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A good game with some flaws

  • Irog
  • 08/09/2016 12:17 AM
  • 1279 views
Aliens are everywhere and it's your job to fight them in this side-scrolling shooter.

You start by choosing the difficulty level then one of the two spacecrafts. The Raven vessel has excellent speed but only a few shields. The Hawk vessel has a good amount of shields but is slower. So you're presented the choice between better dodging or extra hit points. In Easy mode, your spacecraft starts with all its shields while in Normal mode, you start with no shield. This makes the Normal mode much harder and not suited for newcomers. The modes should be renamed Normal and Hard instead of Easy and Normal.

Galaxy Defender has an interesting power up system: when you defeat enemies you can collect upgrade tokens. The tokens don't upgrade your ship directly. If you press Enter after you collected one token, you upgrade your speed. If you collect two or three tokens you upgrade your weaponry. If you collect four tokens you get the maximum shields for your vessel type. And, of course, once used, the token counter reset to zero. This gives you several strategies to fit your play-style. In Normal mode, saving four tokens to get the shields was my top priority.

The game presents a good variety of missions. Next to the classic horizontal and vertical scrolling you have squad missions with allies to help you, travels trough asteroid fields and escort mission. The asteroid fields is a good alternative to standard shooting enemies: the asteroids don't shoot (of course) but they travel very fast! You can also choose the path in some level.

Missions briefings give summarized information about the next mission. The designer kept them short to quickly send you back in action. You get extra info from in-mission dialogues and scripted events. But your ally is too quick at revealing the weakness of the twin turrets. Having more than one ally for a mission makes it too easy.

Sound tacks have this fast beat that pushes your sense of urgency and keeps your dodging skill to its best. One track differs a lot from this to match an event in the story.
Graphics have a good cartoony look and are very practical. With two exceptions: in the vertical scrolling levels, your shadow and the shadows of enemies are plain black which makes them a high contrast moving elements. In a shmup, the high contrast moving elements indicates that the player should focus on those elements. I got hit several times because I dogged a high contrast shadow. In the Easy mode, you fire rockets that have the same color as some enemy bullets (red). This creates a confusion when analyzing bullet patterns. In Normal mode, some effort was made to have the player shoot green projectiles while the enemies shoots red projectiles. The player's allies shoot green laser. This is a smart decision: the instant laser attack don't fill up the screen with extra moving bullets and its slow firing rate limits the laser-show.

When we pause the game (key "P") the game doesn't display a pause indication onscreen. There is no save password in Normal mode. The game starts to slow down when the screen displays a lot of enemies and bullets.

In Normal mode at an alien base, I choose the up direction between up or down and the game hanged there. I tried again with the down direction but it hanged when I was a bit further in the level (when a mini-boss should appear). In Easy mode, I was able to compete that level. At what I believe to be the final mission, there is a boss (A main core, 2 plasma canons and 2 guns) where I get hit by invisible objects causing the loss of 2 shields so I always lose the fight.

On top of the story mode, the game offers two modes to challenge your skills. In Survival you have to kill as may aliens as possible in a horizontal infinite level. Wave has the same goal but in a vertical scrolling level where enemies come in waves organized like in Space Invaders. In both Survival and Wave, you start with no shield and the shield power up is disable so it's a one-hit-kills where you should pick the Raven vessel. Both modes extend the game replayability and provide extremely addictive challenges.

Posts

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Thank you for the fair and honest review. Its great to see people are still playing my games :D
You're welcome. I hope it helps improve your game.
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