AKA Layer Section AKA Galactic Attack
Went in only knowing “its that shmup with the lock-on mechanic,” so I was taken off-guard by what a well-realized journey the game takes you on. There aren’t any intermissions or score breakdowns between levels, just a moment to decompress before the title of the next stage appears on-screen. It’s complemented well by how natural the transitions are, your ship breaking through the atmosphere or descending into the hollow world you’ve been sent to destroy.
There’s also a great tactile quality to everything, maybe best exemplified by the Stage 4 boss, a crab-thing that’s held up by four claws that can each be individually destroyed; go for score and you’ll need to endure a barrage of tough attacks, but take out the appendages on one side of the screen and you’ll send it plunging to an early death. Most of the game is full of these clever moments and surprisingly dynamic backgrounds, but as others have mentioned, there’s a pretty harsh difficulty spike when you get to Stage 6- the screen full of lasers and kamikaze drones that will happily eat through your credits.
I can almost buy this as an appropriate use of the setting, the exciting and detailed locales of the early levels giving way to sterile metallic corridors: a final, brutal line of defense before the last level. At the same time, it’s also hard to shake the, “Alright, you’ve had your fun, now get off the cab” feeling the crops at a similar place in many other arcade games. Maybe it’s just the fact that you can’t bomb, so there’s no way of recovering from being caught out, especially when you’re suddenly being bombarded with so many projectiles. Even more than most shmups, it’s a game that rewards multiple playthroughs, your chances of survival improving dramatically as you learn the choreography and start to preempt enemy waves with your lock-on.
But I imagine that these are issues that will fade with time, and didn’t detract much from my experience with it. In fact, I think this might be a new favorite of mine- left feeling like I had had a much fuller experience than the 30-minute runtime might hint at.
Went in only knowing “its that shmup with the lock-on mechanic,” so I was taken off-guard by what a well-realized journey the game takes you on. There aren’t any intermissions or score breakdowns between levels, just a moment to decompress before the title of the next stage appears on-screen. It’s complemented well by how natural the transitions are, your ship breaking through the atmosphere or descending into the hollow world you’ve been sent to destroy.
There’s also a great tactile quality to everything, maybe best exemplified by the Stage 4 boss, a crab-thing that’s held up by four claws that can each be individually destroyed; go for score and you’ll need to endure a barrage of tough attacks, but take out the appendages on one side of the screen and you’ll send it plunging to an early death. Most of the game is full of these clever moments and surprisingly dynamic backgrounds, but as others have mentioned, there’s a pretty harsh difficulty spike when you get to Stage 6- the screen full of lasers and kamikaze drones that will happily eat through your credits.
I can almost buy this as an appropriate use of the setting, the exciting and detailed locales of the early levels giving way to sterile metallic corridors: a final, brutal line of defense before the last level. At the same time, it’s also hard to shake the, “Alright, you’ve had your fun, now get off the cab” feeling the crops at a similar place in many other arcade games. Maybe it’s just the fact that you can’t bomb, so there’s no way of recovering from being caught out, especially when you’re suddenly being bombarded with so many projectiles. Even more than most shmups, it’s a game that rewards multiple playthroughs, your chances of survival improving dramatically as you learn the choreography and start to preempt enemy waves with your lock-on.
But I imagine that these are issues that will fade with time, and didn’t detract much from my experience with it. In fact, I think this might be a new favorite of mine- left feeling like I had had a much fuller experience than the 30-minute runtime might hint at.