Endearing little homebrew project with some really impressive technical quirks, including:

- FAUX-MODE 7 ON GENESIS - ~ It's top-down 360-rotating action just like the Contra III side-stages. How I think they pull it off is by rotating the pivot points of the tilemap, and then choosing a pre-rotated tile that matches the POV's angle. Very novel stuff, and it moves super smoothly in-game.

- FULLY VOICE-ACTED DIALOGUE - ~ There's fun workshopped-at-home voices for all 5 characters, and yes, literally everything is voiced (except the tutorial text). Crazy to fit that on 4 MB.

- FULL USE OF 6-BUTTON CONTROLLER - ~ The default controls let you toggle all 3 weapons with XYZ and access the map with Mode. Very nifty. There's even implementation for keyboard/mouse play if you do the work of soldering one together for genesis use. Ridiculous.

Besides that it's pretty by the numbers. I picked this up because it had Granada vibes and I thought it would fit into my shmup backlog, but it's a lot more like a Wolfenstein 3D played from a top-down view, navigating blocky mazes and shooting the few goons that get in your way. It's very easy and doesn't have nearly enough enemy types, it gets old pretty quick. It's fun and humble though, you can tell a lot of passion was put into what's here.

Give the developer your support on their Itch page: https://arkagis.itch.io/

Reviewed on Jan 13, 2024


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