I hate this game: Galak-Z

Under normal circumstances, I try to do two things with video games. The first is to try to appreciate the nuances of the production, understand that if something is bad it could be bad for a variety of reasons. Take Sonic Adventure 2. Sure, I disliked it, but Sonic in 3D is hard. And the game had lots of good points, stuff I enjoyed.

The other thing is to try to let my opinion relax, don't start screaming. But you know what? Sometimes, a game just makes me want to scream.

Galak-Z is a space shooter of the 360 degrees of motion sort. I haven't played anything like this in years, and I think the closest thing I could compare it to is probably Ur-Quan Masters. It's not a genre flush with new titles, and I don't think anything has come out in this space approaching the AAA category in generations of gamers. Galak-Z, in a lot of ways, attempts to bring the AAA appeal to this sort of game.

It starts out so well...


Good points turn so quickly into bad points with this game and it's hideously frustrating to see in action. Here's the thing: Galak-Z is visually very attractive, and it has an excellent cast of voice actors, including the guy who plays Dean Venture - Michael Sinterniklaas - who has a distinctive voice that... actually kinda doesn't work here and also Sarah Elmaleh, who played the female cop bot of name I can't remember in Primordia.

And yet I finished like, three missions of this game.

There's a real learning curve to Galak-Z and the reason is the raw number of inputs you're supposed to manage. For casual gameplay the game is a total stinker, your directionals are frustrating alongside an enemy AI that just rams into you. Because it should; every enemy has more health than you and hits just as hard. You need to dodge and fly nimble patterns, but the game world is a tight space, usually taking place inside asteroids, that also happen to be filled with stuff that explodes and slows you, or explodes and depletes your shields instantly. You gotta get a handle on flying in reverse and the controls reversing to go with it, plus using boost, juking and ... I'm pretty sure there's more and I just didn't get to it.

Why didn't I get to it? I mean the game isn't precisely "hard" but it is frustrating. The battlefield is littered with garbage that depletes your shields, and you're constantly stopping to let them regenerate, because that's "fun" and "exciting". If you lose health off the chassis of your craft, good luck - it never regenerates. Do you have enough money to pay for repairs? Too bad, you can only heal 1 tick between missions. All of this is sort of annoying, but overcoming a difficulty curve is fine and doable.

Then the lack of polish kicks in. It kicks in so hard. It boosts into the side of your head like a thrown shoe, hits the keyboard and spills your drink.

What happens when you fail a mission? Well, you have a singular life and non-regenerating health with no checkpoints, your assumption is you would hit the 'quick restart button' and... and wait.

every death, right back here

Wait.

Why am I back on the carrier? Why are you doing the briefing again? Why in the name of all that is holy are you making me redo my loadout? That must be a bug. Wait. Why... why are you talking? Again? The entire mission's dialogue, unending, ceaseless blather repeated over and over again.

Ok, I'll just turn that off. Fine I can just... Look at the map to ... Tell me absolutely nothing. The map doesn't tell you your objectives nor inform you of anything useful. There's a little blurb in the corner about jump points. Great? You need to listen to the horrible blather to know what you're doing and... And I can't. It's awful. The game is just missing so much polish.

I get playing to "get good". I get it. I just went through Lords of the Fallen which I am awful at. I died like... A hundred times. Mostly on bosses. I just reinstalled Dark Souls and I'm going to die so much on that. But imagine playing Dark Souls and it just keeps repeating the same poorly written dialogue over and over again. In fact, maybe it's great dialogue, maybe it's incredible. Over and over again. The game is like tinnitus the voice over.

The level of brutal, unflinching ineptitude here matches my own brutal, unflinching ineptitude at playing the game. But you know what? It's the game's job to be fun while I learn how to play. Having a moronic "quick start button" that resets you back to LISTENING TO THE BRIEFING, AGAIN!?! is just so unappealing.

Also, to be honest, I'm just sick of shallow games with mediocre gameplay coasting on being difficult to work with. The controls are frustrating, the gameplay isn't anything special and who cares? Avoid this game. If you wanna make a game hard to pick up, polish it, and figure out how to get people back into the action quickly. You wanna make a video game that talks til I want to jab a screw driver in my ear?

Well I'll say it sucks.