Witch cards will drop: Tower of Guns

Roguelites, which is a pretty vague half-genre description, spread to many different full genres and do many different things to those games. To my surprise, one of the genres that seems most easily adapted to roguelite behaviors is shooters the list of ones recommended to try is pretty short. I mean you have this one, Tower of Guns, and then you have that other one Ziggurat. Then I don't think much of any have come up as worthwhile.

You'd really think roguelites would prosper with FPS gameplay, given most if not all of the core elements are so easily transitioned over. Random drops, leveling, random events, levels assembled by quasi-procedural nonsense, FPSes can do all of this and maybe actually do it in fun ways. I don't know, maybe there's a literal ton of them, but I can think of like two indie FPS roguelites that don't fall on the list.

It's a little bit annoying that I keep running into roguelite games while doing this streak of reviews, but Tower of Guns I simply had installed from weeks or months ago and had forgotten about it. Recently, I picked up a used geforce 960 GTX, so I was looking at shooters I'd forgotten about and realized I actually had more than a few currently installed. Which is, you know, kind of silly. So I loaded this up and gave it a whirl.

Actually, though I guess I'll find a copy of Ziggurat eventually, maybe the reality is the problems with Tower of Guns highlight why FPS into roguelite is a bit difficult. Guess we'll see whenever that shows up in a bundle or whatever.

Witch cards will drop: Steredenn

I spent way too much money in October (hint: Chicago is expensive) and now I need to get my ass in gear for the Christmas sale! And what place does one take one's ass for the Christmas sale: That's right, grinding on cards. While I idle most of the cruddier games that have cards, there's a ton of good, or at least good looking games that can be short reviewed for fun and cards. And everyone loves selling cards.

One advantage to playing a lot of games is getting to see the filtering of ideas, or even hypothetical parallel evolution. That is to say when designs are not influenced by each other, but rather arrive to the same design conclusion independently. It makes gaming feel a little less like closed individual systems and more like ecosystems of ideas, which almost makes it feeler grander in the way art likes to be played as. We're all aware of basic copying, of taking a basic "thing" from one game or a basic genre, like platformers in the 80s and FPSes in the 90s, but the more subtle cues and design hints make for a more interesting way to see games made.

And to mock their short-comings.

Steredenn has one of the oddest little names I've ever seen. Google's best translation is from Breton and it translates into Star. So the game is basically named Star. It's a simple name for what is ultimately a pretty simple game.

Anyway, Steredenn is a shmup of the side scrolling variety, built from the higher end level of pixel art where style and aesthetics are both emphasized. If the game has much of a story, well, I didn't notice. Instead - as games are wont to do in the modern indie paradigm - the game is a psuedo-roguelike, or roguelite, or something I'm tempted to call rougelite since we've fallen so far from the original design that boy is my face red.

Rougelites kinda drive me batty. Ha! Get it?

Belated hootemer: Starward Rogue

You ever get an idea of what a game is, and wanting that game, in your head? And then when you get said game, you realize you either had it wrong or were thinking of an entirely different title? And you're left in the possession of a game you're now trying to figure out if you even wanted? Well, here's Starward Rogue, and here's me.

Starward Rogue is an "Arcen title". If you've never heard of Arcen, they make a lot of weird games. That's sort of their thing. They're probably one of the most prolific indie developers. On a basic level I admit I feel affection toward Arcen, they try to do something different and keep trying. Some of their games are successes and some aren't, but that just makes them more endearing.

Which kinda makes Starward Rogue a little weird to review. Starward isn't an especially creative or unusual venture, and how I mixed it up with something else is very strange to me. In fact this game is almost a little ironic to review now, but it's just coincidentally a title that appeared in a humble monthly - albeit a humble monthly I didn't pay for, and instead got from a friend - which it has in bundle common with some other games I've been playing.

Anyway, the game is a completely top down roguelite or maybe even roguelike twin stick shooter. I'd say it is "simple" but the game manages to be extremely complex in spite of the fact it's a simple premise and it all kinda rolls from there. I'm putting it under shootember because bullets and shooting, man, bullets covering the screen.

Arcen style yo

Shootember: Nuclear Throne

Shootember was traditionally a month for shooters, but this game involves more shooting than most shooters, so I think it's fair to classify this one under Shootember.

Nuclear Throne was $10, or rather, at the peak of the humble bundle a couple weeks back, though I mostly picked up said bundle for it. I've being eyeing Enter the Gungeon for a while, and it is often mentioned that NT here is either a spiritual predecessor, a game you should just buy instead, or a game a lot like it. You can pick whichever harsh or positive statement you like, I've heard them all. NT has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam, and I've heard lots of good things about it.

I was a little reluctant, which we'll get into, but bundles with multiple quality games are just hard to resist. That's the rub of Humble bundle, isn't it? Buying a bundle of seven or eight games for $10, when you want maybe three of them, but $3.33 doesn't sound so bad for them individually...

It's especially enticing when rumor has it the developers of this game stated they would never put the game on sale, or something to that effect. I haven't touched the rest of the bundle as of writing this, but that's generally how most humble bundle experiences work for me. I play two of the games and forget about the rest.

Indie Gradius: Counterattack

I end up in this situation, pretty often, where I pick up an indie game and I want to write my review like... 15 minutes into playing it. I'm not saying AAA games have more depth, but they tend to ease you into things, whereas games like this you just don't feel like finishing because bam you feel like you already know everything about it.

Counterattack is, before I mention anything else, an early access title. I have no idea what is missing from the game, although the news does mention they plan to revamp the UI. Which is good, because the UI is simply awful, but if they admit they need to work on it I'm not holding it against them.

As for the game itself; it's a side-scrolling space shooter. The storyline is simple: mankind something something, many robots, blah blah, super science space fighter shoot planes, pew pew, off we go to the lasers. The game is a bit lacking in some categories and robust in others.

Glorkian Warrior: Trials of Glork

I'm just going to call this game Glork.

There isn't much to really say about Glork, since it is ultimately a very simple game. You play as Glork, a three eyed "warrior" whose only skills are running around and carrying his super backpack. The super backpack is, however, a character in and of itself that talks. The super backpack fires without input from you, meaning unlike most shmups the game doesn't force you to hold down a button, which is sort of nice.

The game is a shmup in the sense very early games like space invaders were shmups, so I guess we can sort of call it that? When it comes to gameplay, the game isn't complicated. You run around while super backpack fires into very silly looking aliens that on the most part seem barely interested in your presence. You have about three screens to run across, and enemies can basically end up wherever in that space. Most of the game is firmly detached from interacting with you - enemies shoot missiles and fireballs, or spit flame, but very little of it seems directed at you - while you bob and weave trying to avoid attacks. You have a health bar with up to six hits, though most attacks take off 2, so you drop dead pretty damn quickly whenever things do manage to hit you. Healing is pretty rare, so cherish those 3 to 6 hits.

There are a range of enemies but they mostly just float around and make silly noises, and then there's a range of power ups. The game kinda suffers for the power up system, as the basic weapon takes several hits to kill just about everything but the power ups can be pretty bonkers at just sweeping the screen. Some of the power ups, but not all of them, are extended by eating "power crackers" that drop from enemies. So you run around collecting crackers, or more so, when you have a power up. I guess some of the power ups are more like power ups FOR power ups, and they also just happen to improve the basic gun albeit vaguely. Lastly, there are "boss" enemies, which are sort of grim for how grindingly slow they go down if you don't have a power up, but collapse like a house of waffles if you do. Fully powered up you completely destroy screens full of enemies in seconds, so the game's pacing can feel ... Weird I guess. The game has an unlock system but I'm not sure it really does much of anything. I mean you do unlock things, but mostly it barely changes the game.

Glork's main appeal is the silly writing and art style, coupled with goofy cutscenes that happen between games and other oddball bits. The music is also goofy and charming, and the whole presentation is more than the sum of its parts. It does a lot to make the game fun and pleasant even though it is actually kinda grueling and difficult in sections, and is basically just a primitive score attack game.

Anyway, outside of the cute art and the jokes, the game is a little lackluster. As I said, the moment where a boss spawns - which makes getting power ups obnoxiously hard - without a power up is just a big sigh as you grind away on it for quite a while, and you can end up with a lot of moments where there are two enemies on screen bobbing around without killing either of them for what feels like an eternity. I had a good two hours of fun out of the game, but exactly how I'm not quite sure. After a while it gets pretty dull, but for a game I honestly am not certain how I got or why I decided to play it, I certainly wasn't worse off for the experience.

Dork Quadrant: Enemy Mind

Rounding off my set up space shooty games is Enemy Mind, which I got from ... Actually I'm not really certain where I got this, though it was probably in a bundle? I believe this game was in Early access back in 2014, but is probably bundlefare at this point.
 
Enemy Mind is a shmup, and it is in space, AND it has cards - actually what this series was supposed to be about -  with really nice pixel artwork done in the more 16-bit style. The premise of the game, however, gets away from the general shmup thing with two slightly interesting twists on the general basics of the genre.

For one, the game has a core gimmick that shapes basically every design made in its design.

For two, it has a really neat story that relates back to its core gimmick. But the addition of a store is a 'for better or worse' arrangement, as it continues to add to the odd issues of the game.

The "gimmick" or "premise" depending on how you jive with it, is that your ship is not your ship. You are a psychic entity, capable of possession that leaps from ship to ship. You fight using their guns, you move using their skills and you die as they would die - unless you leap to the next ship.

It's nothing super hyper new, but it isn't on the other hand something I'm all that familiar with. I'm sure it has been done before, but I'm struggling to remember another example besides like ... Messiah or something.

Cards for Stars: Steel Storm Burning Retribution

Retribution is going to be one of those dirty words I stop wanting to see in titles.

Anyway: this game didn't have cards up until recently, but I can remember ages ago wanting to play it and ending up with it in a bundle. Pre-cards, I apparently played four minutes, but it might have been before I got my first controller for my PC.

Post-cards, well, here I am.

Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is four random words strung together, titled a three quarters from the back shooter. It plays sort of like a twin-stick and sort of like a shmup - I think this sort of game used to be quite common and now is not quite so.

Steel Storm BR has most of the basics down pat: the controls work well, the game looks fine, the weapon loadouts feel good and the weapon sounds work nicely. The little hovertank feels pretty good, a bit less requiring of frustrating finesse compared to the usual twin stick controls while still engaging your hnads in a nice way.

The music isn't very good. The problem lies in the usual, the NES problem: tracks are too short and there's too much downtime where the music becomes the core of the experience.

The game itself drops the floor out from under itself. Combat feels good and relatively slick, but it becomes very obvious very quickly that the camera angle cripples you. As best I can tell, you just can't hit enemies "off the screen", which happens almost instantly once you try to dodge away from incoming fire. The enemy seems to basically not exist off the screen, they don't follow up or pursue you, they just dawdle around. You can seemingly hit them with the MIRV special weapon, but I haven't found the other weapons can reliably snipe them while you're off dodging, so you end up with combat often taking a really long time.

The game also does a lot of things that dilute the enjoyment. For one, as I said, the camera is just so far up that you can't really get into the groove of fighting through multiple enemies - you're constantly pedaling back and forth out of conflict. The game also uses health packs, but there really isn't much threat in the game except for the other big thing I dislike. Enemies are initially placed on the map, but that's not all that dangerous since as I said they don't pursue and don't really come after you. So the game teleports enemies on top of you, en masse, which is about the only time you're really threatened. You never die to attrition, so these weird health packs that heal 25% just feel monotonous. But since you're never really under any threat from placed enemies, I guess regenerating health felt like too much.

Also the game has keycards and unlocking doors and all that jazz, but it doesn't really do much other than set off teleporting enemies and pad out the game's length. The doors and stuff just end up looking really lazy, it's not like you're lowering defenses or using special circumstances to blow through them, they're literally "a forcefield" that sits around "the target". It's boring.

Basically the game's core is good, but the AI is way too lacking and the camera is awful. If you could see more, fight more at a great range with more visuals going off I think the game would have been pretty exciting. You get these great moments now and again, but on the most part it just feels sluggish. The teleporting enemies thing just leads to cheap, irritating deaths that coupled with the plodding out of combat pace make for a really dull experience. I finished the tutorial and a pair of missions and just found it too plodding.

As an odd note, I re-watched superbunnyhop's two parter on Rage and Doom a couple days ago. He talks about the gameplay of Doom as being a top down shump extended out to psuedo-3D - something akin to Maximum Carnage or Smash TV, maybe - but this game really is just that, but not in 3D. Keycards, circle strafing, dodging slow moving projectiles. It could have been great, but instead it's too slow and too plodding.

Cards for Stars: Super Star Path

The endless march of bundles games and grinding cards off them continues on after a couple week break to learn how to paint miniatures again. (Not well, mind you). Up this ... Week? Day? is Super Star Path, which I acquired in the groupees #25 greenlight bundle not all that long ago.

Super Star Path claims to be a mixture of puzzle game and top down space ship shooter. I would say this ... Is sort of true? The puzzle comes from shooting the immobile and rather defenseless "aliens". If you set your shots up wrong, you end up with a dead end path, and then you die. There are also boss fights, at the end of each level, and some shooty elements in the later levels within the level.

The game is very polished; the controls work well, the options menu is fully featured, the graphic work, sound, music and voice acting are all quite good. The steam announcements from the devs make it sound like the game has problems, but on my aging machine I never hit a hitch and my hour plus of playing was all pretty smooth.

There is a full upgrade system and a large selection of ships to purchase. Unfortunately or fortunately, the ships don't play all that differently, each one generally have a defensive advantage, or a mild offensive advantage. Different defenses tend to be keyed to different levels, you are clearly supposed to do certain levels with certain ships. It's a little Megaman-y, if you will. The upgrade system is supplied by two types of drops, enemy specific ones or just getting gems off the run off the mill enemies that explode en masse.

The game has some real issues though, and after an hour, it starts to drag. It has much the same problem of say, Block Legend DX, where elements of the game can be kind of mindless then you have to really pay attention to bosses. Super Star Path is a lot worse, though, for this.

Basic problem: The main game is a bit meandering, and often you're just sitting there in a narrow path waiting to move forward and unable to shoot whatever is threatening you - a lot of which does not care about the 'blocks' in the way or anything akin to line of sight. The column is simply too tight, and the game's rng too often produces very narrow openings that just lead to periods of being bored. Several of the later levels are better about this, but there's a dull point midway through the game. The more frustrating problem is it is easy to slip up when fighting an enemy that doesn't interact with the "terrain" and end up blocking yourself in. The whole crystallized aliens thing requires trying to aim past the front row and while it's a cool mechanic, it doesn't interact well with some of the designs.

As for the other thing, the bosses play so differently from the rest of game it ends up feeling a little jarring. The bosses also rely on mostly not paying attention to them and just dodging their shots, which is ... Kinda dull actually? I guess that is a shmup thing, but I don't see why you can't do phased sections of the fight where you get some actual dps uptime. If you like shmups, it is quite effective.

Simply put, Super Star Path is a couple good ideas, a nice looking game and then a bit of a let down. In the first hour you see very little variety, and you can only get blocked in to slowly die to the screen moving on so many times before you yawn the game off your computer - frankly, it should just have a quick reload button, since why not? I had fun with it, and I do like the music, but the potential just isn't worked with.

I don't see why some of the levels didn't have wildly different terrain or branching paths or ... Turning or just any sort of variety to break it up. The guy (guys? gals?) who did it produced a polished, nice looking game with good assets, but they could have made a much better game with some minimal expansion. Anyway, if it looks appealing, grab it on sale. I'm not complaining about the first forty-five minutes, which is pretty fair for paying like forty cents or something for it.

Card Crusade: Riddled Corpses

Riddled Corpses is the byproduct of yet another Groupees bundle, or so I think. I'm not entirely certain which one and I'm not going to look it up, but I want to stress that most card grind games I write short reviews on I didn't exactly buy them. I also want to mention the game doesn't let me take normal overlay screenshots, so this has less images than I'd like

Riddled Corpses is a zombie themed very arcade era twin stick shooter. You moved with one stick, shoot with the other. And you will move, and you will never stop shooting. That's almost the entire game right there, except you also get screen clearing bombs and a time freeze power that doesn't really work the way you'd expect. Seriously though, you move from zombies and you shoot zombies. Zombies primarily do touch damage, though higher power enemies spit gunk at you and the like.

Visually, Riddled Corpses is a pretty simple and clean looking pixel game. It does have some sort of dynamic lighting going on, which looks pretty cool sometimes and at other times seems to blotch out random parts of the screen. The pixel artwork is good, solid work with lots of variety and the animations are simple but satisfying. Admittedly the game isn't exactly a joy in motion, but it's a twin stick game where you shoot zombies and that doesn't really require or benefit from insane graphical fidelity. Visibility is crucial and that is a problem we'll come back to.

The audio is good. There is no speech or voice acting that I found in an hour of playing it, but the music is decent and the sound effects are mostly good. I do find the zombies seem a little ... Less than invested, we'll say, in being shot but you kill a ton of them so it's probably for the best.

In fact, the game is largely pretty good, except for two glaring issues. The first one, which I mentioned above, is that visibility was not precisely the cornerstone of the UI's development, meaning there's a ton of clutter on the screen and things will happily hang out under there. This is primarily an issue of difficulty, but it feels unfair that you can't see something because it is hanging out under the player 2 press start flashing nonsense.

The game's other big issue may or may not offend. In the first playthrough I was rather bemused - I lasted a couple minutes, but it seemed like absolutely everything was taking ages to go down. Were cars destructible terrain? Am I supposed to do a move and shoot phase on the mini-boss? Would I always have the identical same weapon? As it turns out, the game drops "gold" which can then be used to upgrade your character, buy other characters and the like. The grinding isn't super horrific, but it took me a couple attempts on the game's first level to get to the second level, and that level's required DPS was once again well above what my leveled weapon was pointing out. Basically, a big part of the game is being an extremely stripped down ARPG. Get loot, upgrade your mang, shoot many zombies until your current level isn't enough to push you forward.

Obviously play skill is important, but I honestly don't think you can DPS some of the later waves even in the first level without a decent chunk of upgrade. So whether or not you like grinding in your pick up and play game, well, that's on you.

There's something odd about the controls. I'm not entirely certain if it has something to do with the xbox one's deadzones or the game, but it acts really odd at times. You find yourself pressing hard left on the stick but firing sort of on a diagonal. I honestly couldn't quite figure it out, but it wasn't quite as responsive as I'd like.

Anyway, general conclusion is I'd give the game a pass, but if you like grinding or really want to play a decent twin stick, it is decent. But it is also super grindy which for me takes away from the appeal of the game. More than anything, though, it is how weird the controls end up feeling - like I said, that could very well be the xbox one controller not quite working right, but the deadzoning gets really obnoxious and kinda cut enjoyment of the game.

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2013 in review

As with last year, this is a set of mini reviews summarizing my recollections of games I played over the course of 2013. Unlike last year, I'm going to be really frank about something: I don't necessarily recall, with perfect accuracy, how I felt about the games while I was playing. This is more or less a summary of how I feel about them a week, a month or almost a full year afterwards. This is after digestion, these are the lasting impressions.

I divide this into four categories, which work in the following somewhat conflicting ways. Category A is the games I think, regardless of your tastes, you should give a serious look at and try because I really enjoyed them. Category B, inversely, are game I think you should try only if you like the genre they're in, but otherwise I felt pretty highly about them. Category C are games I liked or sort of like, but I'm not really recommending unless you're already inclined towards them, or I had problems with getting them running. Category D lastly are games I just stopped playing and/or can't really see personally ever telling anyone to play.

You may notice this review system is entirely subjective. While I do my best to be impartial about things that aren't objective in nature, the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to look at my reviews and decide if you agree with me or don't. If you do, then my opinion is worthwhile, but if you don't maybe you like the games I don't like, and vice versa. As an aside, where I put my experiences does not interrelate with where you put yours. If you really liked a game and I didn't, it doesn't matter, it just means we disagree and you can probably look at the review to figure out why. I get hung up on stuff that doesn't matter to most people, but I do tend to talk about why.

To me, that's the idea, to talk about flaws and facets, and then maybe other people can figure out from my subjective opinions how they'd mesh with their subjective opinions. Because ultimately we're not all that objective, except I will say I'm a fanboy of absolutely goddamn nothing and that's my thing.

Also these reviews are not, as with last year, of games entirely from MY 2013. Many of them are older, but some are more recent, but I feel like hey - how often do you get to read a review of complete games years later, or compared to modern titles? The point here is to discuss if this $5 title is still worth your money four years after its release, and how shit ages, and if we have time how many donkeys power uPlay.
 

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Ether Vapour Remaster

Man, I just don't know. What makes for a good shmup anyway? I want to say visibility and slick design make for a good shmup, but maybe I'm totally wrong or I'm just super awful. Well no, I am super awful at shmups, but they (I think?) mostly fall into the domain of really twitchy "challenge" games like torture platformers where I am completely not the correct audience anymore.

This is actually the fourth shmup I've played in recent memory - I played Jamestown in 2011 and liked it, but I'm hesitant to spend a long time getting good at twitchy games when I have so many other, more rewarding games to play. Then I tried Syber Arcade, which I reviewed as "good but short", and after it Satazius. After hitting the play button for Satazius my headphones begin uttering a sound I would describe as the sonic hybrid of a cat hissing and a wood chipper being run through a blender. You can assemble and re-assemble that sentence however you'd prefer, but basically it sounds super insanely awful and I just didn't play that.

I'll come right out and say that I liked Syber Arcade more than I liked this game by a pretty big margin. Ether Vapour is visually just not very distinct, which can really get irritating when the screen is covered in crap, and relies much less on tactics and much more on rote memorization. I do enjoy the fact you have three different weapons, rather than an upgrade system, but the lack of an upgrade system always takes away from shmups for me. That's the child in me, sure, but the gradius system of ridiculous power ups as you can momentum in the game is just thrillingto me. The other thing is that the game gives you very little wiggle room in bursts of fire, which is very difficult to deal with and maybe I'm just shitty but it kinda feels like I'm supposed to know better from replaying the game.

On top of that, enemies can be on other planes along any axis, meaning you can't hit them and it can be really difficult to quickly discern between a group that is, and a group that is not. Syder Arcade did this as well, but far less often and the art style there was more distinct. It just feels kind of messy and gross - enemies can be off your plane and firing at you, but you can't hit them back? It just strikes me as innately unfun. The one weapon allows you to 'lock on' and fire homing missiles, but this doesn't really have any intelligence in its targeting - You can shoot at enemies you can't fire on with other weapons, but it's only useful in boss fights since with multiple targets they seem to just shoot whatever you could hit normally anyway. The weapon also has lag in targeting and firing, which I just don't get. It seems to do less damage so it doesn't feel like it would be universally useful since enemies flood the screen if you don't kill them at a brisk pace.

The game allows you to turn on hit boxes, which is a great feature and it's amazing how tiny your hit box is compared to how big your ship's graphic is, but it isn't much help when you're avoiding enemy ships ramming into you. The effective area of the screen comes off as very, very small but also not very distinct. That lovely feeling of dodging and weaving between life threatening but very clear objects? Pretty rare, though it did crop up a little in the city level.

nice headband

Anyway, like I said, the graphics are a bit muddy and washed out, with plain backgrounds. The city level is just a blur of buildings going by. The buildings are grey. The enemy ships? Grey. The end result: Blargh, god I miss sprites. Watch someone play Blazing Star or any of the other Neo Geo shmups made when dinosaurs walked the Earth and yeesh. I know it's not all about graphics but this game looks like it could have been released before Shadow of the Beast, let alone a Neo Geo game. The audio is fine, the music the pretty usual fare. It does seem to stutter a little, and my system while being a year old and featuring a 460GTX is not at all below par. I don't really know if I'm just absolutely awful at shmups or if Ether Vapour is just entirely for another audience, but I didn't really care overly for the game. I'd settle into the groove for a bit, but it's hard to keep up with grey on grey on mushy grey then I'd die. There's also super anime as fuck story pages between levels, but I doubt it's going to do anything more than 'mysterious hero is mysterious, pew pew, bullets go into enemy FACE' so I turned that right off.

Frankly, maybe I'm just terrible at shmups, but what do I look back on playing other shmups recently as fun whereas this is just a chore?

Ether Vapour Remaster is the third game in a bundle I bought off Groupees for $2.25 that has cards. At this stage, I've actually profited on the exchange, which soothes the fact Satazius and Yatagarasu didn't really work. Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos is such a sweet name for a game, though I don't think I'll ever get around to that one.

The Secret to Success is Card Work: Syder Arcade

This is going to be a weird one just on the back of things not working out as expected. See, like many steam users, I've got too many games and many of those games come with cards. Cards are nice, since they sell for a dollar or two in total but they encourage me to idle games using a program that reports to steam the game is being played. But I like to lead a review with my play time and idling prevents that from being useful. And sometimes, I just don't really get grabbed by a game but I don't want to badmouth it either. It just goes on the back of the list.

Anyway the idea here was going to be - I would play a game til I got the card drops, then move onto a couple other titles with cards I probably won't get around to writing full reviews of. It's not as serious a process, but I could preface it as such! One problem: Syder Arcade appears to be too short to obtain all four of its card drops. I'm certainly willing to admit maybe I just missed a mode unlock or something, but eh, we'll get into it...

I have a real soft spot for side-scrolling shooty ship games and graphically this game is a joy to look at.  The engine is pretty smooth, the ships all look good, the characters (all four of them) look great during the little silly pseudo cutscenes and the enemy ship designs are visually pleasant. There's sort of a weirdness to how they seem to be two very distinct styles of design, but whatever I don't think thematic linking is all that necessary in a shmup. While I have a soft spot for spaceship bullet hell games I am not fundamentally any good at them - I might have been decent as a child, but I don't have the visual responsiveness necessary to be any good now. So I played through 'the campaign' on the 2nd up difficulty, which was a bit too easy in parts.

The art assets really shine on the HUD, it just looks quite nice to me and information comes readily. The game also does audio alerts and the announcer voiceovers are good, but not spammy. You fight some giant bug monster stuff and then descend to an ice planet, with a sort of mediocre boss fight...

Then, abruptly, the game just ... Ended? A little credit bit starts playing and one of my big issues with the game comes up - I can't quit the game! So it's just rolling along with these credits and I quickly tire of watching names, so I alt-f4 and flip through the campaign menu, realizing these are all just levels and not individual campaigns. Which is sort of a bummer. And seriously, I hit every button on my keyboard and gamepad. Is this an amiga reference? I have no idea.

The game does come with a survival mode, which I gave a couple tries to, but the fact of the matter is - to me anyway - the enemies are way too bullet spongey. So I'm basically focusing all of my efforts on dodging enemy fire, not really killing anything and then the screen is covered in enemy units. This works pretty nicely in the campaign since you end up dodging around against a limited number of foes, but in survival it reminds me of playing a RPG and wandering into a zone you're too low level to do. Just sitting there, plinking away ineffectively. Maybe that's something shmup lovers are big on, but it didn't work for me.

The music and audio clips are excellent - Well, I think one song wasn't so good, but I generally quite liked what was hitting my ears. The game also does this neat thing where you can flip directions and turn around, which is pretty neat in the campaign and again really unenjoyable in the survival stuff. Again I'm not sure if this is common as I haven't played so many shmups, but it's new to me.

So, to conclude, I liked the game and I was given it so I'm not fretting too much, but an hour of play time for $10 is probably too much. Maybe pick it up cheap, or maybe the devs will add some content later on? Hard to say and hard to recommend as such, but the complaint "there isn't enough" is not so bad a complaint when it ends with "because I wanted more!"