Buttery Protöthea
At first glance, Protöthea resembles any other top-down scrolling shooter. You control a ship, and you shoot stuff. Point the Wii Remote at the screen, though, and greater depth immediately becomes apparent. Whereas many vertical shoot'em-ups lock you into shooting straight forward, Protöthea gives you full 360-degree control of your ship's firepower. The on-screen cursor also allows you to aim and drop an unlimited supply of bombs to destroy ground targets.
It's a control setup that few vertical shooters have attempted in the past -- Psikyo's Zero Gunner series offered similar 360-degree shooting, but lacked the bomb-dropping gimmick. The experience resembles a cross between Namco's classic Xevious and the Wii port of Geometry Wars Galaxies. If nothing else, it's an interesting combination that packs tons of potential.
The recently released top-down shooter on the PlayStation Network can be fun, but because it doesn't require any brain power, this overly repetitive title can turn you into a gamer cliché - a slug entrenched firmly in the ass-grove of his couch with minimal mental activity.
Commando 3 starts off promisingly enough. You are a member of a three person commando unit called the Jackals. Teammates Wolf, Coyote and Fox offer different skill sets and abilities but all three are tough and lethal. Once in the jungle, the bullets start flying. Your mission is to eliminate wave after wave of enemy goons, nab power-ups, save POW's, grab medals and defeat the boss at the end of each level - classic fare from the makers of Commando and Mercs, which is exactly the problem with Commando 3.
In Aces, gamers play as a lone human space pilot who faces overwhelming odds to protect the Earth from ugly, trash talking aliens. Replace the Ko-Dan Armada with the Skurgian Armada and the story for this game starts to feel familiar. If you had a sidekick that looked like an iguana this game may as well be called "The Last Starfighter Returns"
Back in the day, side-scrollers dominated consoles. If you were an Italian plumber or a blue hedgehog, you could only move to the right - the gaming equivalent of Zoolander. Omega Five has made old school new, taking the side-scroller into breathtaking 3-D. The stunning visuals are on full display from the start, with attacks coming from all sides as the screen slowly moves right. The characters, two to start with and two unlocked later, are also easy on the eyes. There's Ruby, a leggy, blond babe is reminiscent of Seven of Nine, and Tempest, a four-armed freak so confident, he only uses two arms to shoot. It's a visual feast and a sweat inducing challenge, but the fun doesn't last.
There is just enough of a back story to provide a reason for throwing hundreds, if not thousands, of enemies at you. But really, as is often the case with these types of games, Empire's focus isn't on the narrative but on the gameplay. The action takes place over a series of rooms which make up each of the few worlds in the game. Each room is filled with a set amount of enemies that increase in number and ability as the difficulty is ratcheted up. The enemies themselves are well animated, and rather diverse in both pattern and ability-you'll encounter plenty of turrets, swarming enemies, long-ranged foes, and larger bosses to name just a few. The environments themselves are also rather diverse, and some of them go so far as to change on the fly as you're fighting, which definitely changes up the pace at some points.
Undertow is an arcade action-shooter with that places a strong emphasis on multiplayer. While there is a single-player section, it's composed of just over a dozen missions, which shouldn't take you more than two hours or so to complete. The single-player missions serve mainly as an extended tutorial for the multiplayer section of the game, introducing the basic mechanics of the game and the various units and abilities. While it has little room for replayability, the developers have included a much appreciated online capable cooperative mode for the single-player.
The real meat of the game then is in its multiplayer segment which is largely geared towards a gameplay mode that revolves around capturing spawn points on each underwater map. Each of these maps is quite astounding in its quality and is rather diverse, ranging from old Atlantis ruins to modern underwater bases, all of which have plenty of different options to take when looking to advance towards the next enemy spawn point.
Ikaruga is a vertical strolling shooter with a simplistic button scheme but difficult to master game play. Blasting enemies and avoiding fire is what you'd expect but the twist here is mastering your ships polarity. Bad guys shoot in two different colors, white and black. The polarity button allows you to switch your ship's shields and absorb one wave of fire or the other. Its a simple move but when both colors of bullets are flying, strategy becomes more important than trading shots.
Andrew Ramsey (31)
Ian Guss (32)
Tae Kim (1)
Terry Terrones (131)
- Review: Protöthea
- I don't quite get the design logic behind games like Protöthea. Surely nobody said, "Okay, we've got a decent game concept here. Now let's make it less fun!" during its creation, but the end result feels like an almost competent game weighed down by design decisions that suck away all potential enjoyment.
- http://www.gameproarcade.com/article/87173/review-protöthea/
Read >>