I was in need of some fresh pew pew or puzzley action this weekend so I downloaded loads of arcade game demos from Xbox Live. I thought I might as well review them so here are my brief thoughts and knee-jerk reactions. With all games I played until I reached the end of the demo or got sick of it.
Ratings Guide
★★★★★ Impressive. I struggle to find major faults with the game and will probably buy it.
★★★★ Excellent. Not quite epic enough for a 5. I might buy later when I feel like a new game.
★★★ Good. Overall high quality but has a significant shortcoming in one area.
★★ Average. No real reasons to keep me playing beyond trying it out.
★ Poor. Overall bad design or just plain irritating. I would delete to save the space.
PowerUp Forever
★★★★★ Top-down dual-stick space shooter. Really impressive in all areas. Great darkly ambient music that ramps up to upbeat glitch as you advance through the game. Impressive use of stereo sound effects. Has quite a mysterious feel as the game world is a lot bigger than your screen’s viewport at first. You draw out elusive Guardian bosses by destroying their minions and filling their “rage gauge”. When each Guardian is destroyed you absorb its energy, your ship grows and the viewport zooms out so you can see more of the world. A larger ship also makes it harder to dodge enemies. There’s good AI too, for example I saw a Guardian on low health run away and hide behind some obstacles. This game feels quite deep and immersive, much more than any other shooter I’ve played. The graphics may contribute to this, they are colourful but also kind of gritty and not so “fake plastic shiny”. A few minor criticisms though: menus are way too slow and “fadey” (fuck off!); it needs a more epic-sounding name (e.g.”Guardian Rage”); and the first level feels a bit grindey. I’ll probably end up buying this if I can get past level 3. Here is a video.
Mutant Storm Reloaded
★★★★★ Top-down dual-stick shooter. I loved this game on the PC so buying this was a no-brainer. Great shiny graphics, punchy sound effects, and nice ambient music. It’s another fast-paced action shooter to rival Geometry Wars in addictiveness. Checkpoints every 10 levels. Good difficulty curve. Only pain its the pointless 13 second post-death wait while you spam the A button trying to get back to the action.
Galaga Legions
★★★★☆ Space Invaders layout shooter. Highly polished graphics, sound and music. Has good fast-paced action with more strategic gameplay than your average shooter. A nice feature is the enemy paths are traced out onscreen before they arrive so you can strategically place your 2 satellite guns for optimal spammage. Shooting a captured Galaga gives you a swarm of minions which is essential as certain stages seem impossible without this extra help. Never played the original but now I want to. This could fill the void that was created when I bought Star Soldier R on WiiWare.
Mutant Storm Empire
★★★★ I was tempted to buy this game just for the awesome glitchy menu music, but I restrained myself. It seems like the logical adventure progression of Mutant Storm. You explore a maze instead of isolated abstract rooms, with each victory opening up a door to the next room. It will sound stupid but I don’t like the left-to-right progression at the start of the game. It means you’re always holding the right analog stick (shoot) to the right, which is not the most comfortable position to sustain when you’re right handed. I prefer to shoot to the left and in the more “arena” style top-down shooters I position myself to the right of enemies if I can. The game feels a bit more chunky than the original, with fewer larger enemies that take longer to kill, compared to the swarms of babies we’re used to in the original. Instead of bombs, you have a super weapon with limited ammo which you can power on and off. This is handy but I found myself wanting for bombs as I inevitably end up surrounded in these kinds of games.
The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom
★★★☆ This is not groundbreaking stuff as some reviews would have you believe. I consider this to be just a slight variant on Lemmings. Instead of having predefined roles, you record the path of each clone of yourself. It will inevitably be compared to Braid, because the concept is very similar to the game mechanic of Braid’s World 5, where you use your shadow to help solve the puzzles. Winterbottom’s demo puzzles are pretty clever but unlike Braid’s multiple worlds, there probably isn’t enough variety in the game to keep me playing, so I can’t justify a 4-star rating. The graphics are what they are but I found the old film greyscale styling to be quite depressing. Here it has no point, unlike its poignant use in World of Goo.
R-Type Dimensions
★★★ Side scrolling space shooter. This is one of those Monkey Island style remakes where you can switch between classic 2D and redone 3D graphics. I find this choice a bit distracting in any game of the sort. Here, the 3D graphics are really nice and polished, but the music and sound haven’t been redone so when playing the new shiny version, this seems out of place. I expect epic music with bassy dance beats and modern power synth and explosion sounds with depth, not blips and beeps. This reduces immersion and just makes the game feel like a child’s toy version of Gradius V (seriously, the level designs are noticeably similar).
Star Trek D.A.C.
★★★ This is a pretty decent attempt to apply new features to the top-down dual-stick shooter concept (e.g. different ship classes and multiplayer deathmatch etc.). The battles on the trial map were too sparse resulting in most of my time being spent looking for the other enemies (bots). I think you need to be a fan of the franchise or really into the online multiplayer to get into this game. Another gripe is that the maps have “invisible walls” at their edges. I HATE invisible walls with a passion. They point to lack of creative design detract from realism. Make me crash into them or fall off or just make the walls explicit. Anything is better than forcing me to scratch my head while I try to figure out why I’m not moving.
Tempest
★★★ Firstly, the music in this game is top-class. Sound effects and graphics are quite good. But it lost me at the micro gameplay. In Tempest you look down tunnels of varying shapes and move your ship around the perimeter which is quantised into a number of columns. Your ship must be on the exact column to destroy the enemy which is advancing up it. My main frustration is the controls suffer from the old precision/speed power struggle. With sensitivity set to normal, I don’t have the micro skills to select the right column with enough precision so I’m constantly over-correcting. When I turn down the sensitvity, I lose significant speed, meaning I can’t get to the columns when I need to. But perhaps mastering this level of micro is the main point of the game. If it is, that’s not my kind of game.
E4: Every Extend Extra Extreme
★★ Rythym-based top-down shooter. Slow loading/logo screens. Nice LSD graphics and the music is sightly above average but I don’t really get the point of this game. You’re meant to detonate your ship to the beat setting up chain reactions, which I tried… but nothing much happens. A few enemies explode then you wait ages until your ship respawns at a time that’s suboptimal for another on-beat detonation. So it’s just kinda frustrating. There’s another game mode that’s more like geometry wars but it seems equally pointless. The gameplay feels like someone’s half-arsed experiment.
Aces of the Galaxy
★ Third person space shooter. Controls let it down. Primary shoot is A button, meaning you can’t steer and position the aim reticle while shooting. This is why trigger buttons exist! The roaming aim reticle is also very confusing and non-intuitive in this view. Basically, the ship controls weren’t exactly like flying a Banshee in Halo, so I hated it.
Novadrome
★ Arena racing car shoot-out. Shiny graphics but controls are not intuitive and feel really quite sluggish -- this may also be due to the insanely low gravity. Requires excessive use of handbrake to achieve anything resembling a turning circle. Shooting is auto-aim with toggle between enemies. Could have made much better use of right stick for targeting. Basically, these cars didn’t drive like the Warthog in Halo so I hated it.
Space Invaders Extreme
★ This is basically just the original game with a shiny facelift and some Xbox Live features. The creators have made a failed attempt to use “musical” sound effects to make it play a bit more like a rhythm game but the result is they are so fucking annoying to the point where this game is unplayable. I was surprised that Good Game recently had good things to say about this game.
