I’ve been playing this game for the past few days. I found it overwhelming at first and I probably would have given it a positive though tepid recommendation back then.
But every time I play it I see more of its brilliance and I can no longer allow it to simply be buried in the “Games You Played Today” thread.
Just now I came close to finally beating the campaign mode on the easiest difficulty (which I suspect I will never move beyond, but who knows). I thought the final boss was just going to be the last of the five I hadn’t yet been randomly dealt earlier, but no. It was a much harder version of said boss and I wasn’t prepared for that.
As I mentioned in the other thread, this game is by ex-Housemarque developer Kimmo Lahtinen who worked on Super Stardust HD, one of my all-time favorite games. I saw in an interview that he spent the last 4.5 years making this game with no income at all.
This has the best arcade look and feel of anything I’ve played in ages, with echoes of Robotron 2084 among other obvious influences. It can almost get too intense at times until you sort of enter a flow state. There are moments when the music combines with the other elements to create a transcendent experience.
The game is so busy and frantic that the music can get buried in the chaos, aside from its basic rhythm. But then at times a track like this will push its way to the surface and demand your attention for at least a few seconds.
You weren’t kidding, this game is incredible! Just played for the first time and had a hard time stopping. Managing my upgrades and scoring letters and strike cooldowns while playing this perfectly tuned twin stick shooter, it’s massaging my brain just right.
I managed to beat the first boss on easy. Took me a minute to wrap my head around how the card stuff works but I think it adds a great wrinkle. If I understand it correctly you have 8 cards you select at first (that are in fact already selected for you) and 8 more that you can unlock. Each card corresponds to one of the power ups you can buy with the glimmer that enemies drop and the three other cards you can pick from at certain points in the middle of a match each have three attribute modifications for a particular power up but what you get is randomly determined upon selection. So for instance one card might have three things that modify your strike move but you can’t select which one you get you just have to roll with whatever it gives you.
That combined with the awesome visuals and audio and the way the stage is constantly changing shape and dropping different enemy patterns on you makes a pretty mighty brew. Three difficulty levels and two more ships to unlock that presumably open up two more different play styles add more layers to the onion.
Looking forward to unraveling it more but it is a strong contender already to stand with the other greats in the genre.
This was definitely a threshold for me. When I unlocked boss rush mode I thought to myself, Why would I want to try that? These bosses are hard. But now I think boss rush mode is great and I can finish it on the starting difficulty.
Still haven’t managed to defeat a final boss in campaign mode, though.
Yes, those 8+8 are decks, each containing three cards. When you select a deck, its three cards come up randomly for selection along with the other (sealed) decks you haven’t yet chosen.
Basically, the card selection screen stays open until you’ve picked a card. And if you pick a deck instead of a card, the deck in that slot seems to always get replaced with card from that deck.
boojiboy7’s score in classic mode (which is basically just Geometry Wars with a few additional elements) seemed out of reach but gave me a goal to shoot for and I just now had a particularly good run.
(It’s possible I could have done even better had my cat not kept sitting in front of the screen to watch the game, blocking part of my view.)
Pretty sure a strike collects them all, including those already on the ground.
One thing I haven’t yet figured out is how the “triple strike” works that’s in a couple different modes. You seem to start out with three but then when it grows back you don’t seem to have that many. Maybe there’s some banking mechanism I’m not yet comprehending.
it seems to me that it’s basically chained strikes – once you use the first one you have a limited amount of time to input a second strike and then a third. if you fail to use the second or third strike in time it still goes on cooldown (so you effectively “lost” those strikes). think of it as a single strike with a single cooldown that you can immediately chain into two more strikes if desired.
skipping green powerups gives you score multiplier in that mode, which i think is crucial to getting good scores because when they disappear they gives you 3x yellow powerups, which you can delay and chain strikes into to help you survive even longer.
Since posting that I tried the crash mode again and found that if I hit a token every other strike or so I can just keep going. I think it might refill all three if you’re quick enough. I got up to 8-9 strikes in a row, which was great.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that the level 2 bosses are not only at the end of the campaign. I had it throw one at me earlier in a run. I wonder if the game adjusts the difficulty when you do well, Rez-style, or whether it’s just random. Maybe it mixes in those you’ve beaten at least once.
it’s interesting that session length isn’t directly correlated to score. i think skipping those green pickups really matters for your multiplier. i do think some of them are worth it though because they give you other powerups too. later i try not to pick them up unless i’m out a shield but idk what the optimal strategy is. depends how it scales.
