Recommended by kingbancho on this list.
A game comprising solely what a teenager in 1996 would think is cool. And to be fair, that teenager gets a lot of things right. The opinions of Backloggd users should be judged based on whether they think "dude on a motorcycle, throwing explosive boomerangs at tanks before somersaulting off a cliff into the jungle below" is sufficiently exciting.
It feels surprisingly good to play. There's only three buttons (four if you're tagging in other characters) but it's still a competent Souls-like, taking clear inspiration from FromSoft's flagship IP - a combat roll, environmental storytelling, an Ornstein and Smough boss fight, the ability to use a bow for which you carry surprisingly few arrows. In all seriousness, It could stand to have a little more enemy variety thrown in - there's plenty of variance if you include mini-bosses and bosses-bosses, but the path to those bosses will inevitably be slightly different flavors of green dude: green dude shooting at you, green dude smoking, green dude carrying a stretche-- ahh.
I do wish the characters themselves were more unique, since a couple of them feel functionally identical, but the ones that stand out (again, the boomerangs) are genuinely fun to use and make the experience fresh when "gunboy with grenade" starts to lose its novelty. The experience overall is short enough that you probably won't get that tired of the player characters unless you're really goofing it up, but I do think it's worth mentioning since I tend to value variety pretty highly in games.
I'd like to say more, but I don't have a lot of top-down shooters of any kind under my belt, much less these older arcade-style games. Given that I wasn't expecting to like this at all going in, the fact that I've come out of the experience this positive is a testament to the strength of the core experience and its steep learning curve.
A game comprising solely what a teenager in 1996 would think is cool. And to be fair, that teenager gets a lot of things right. The opinions of Backloggd users should be judged based on whether they think "dude on a motorcycle, throwing explosive boomerangs at tanks before somersaulting off a cliff into the jungle below" is sufficiently exciting.
It feels surprisingly good to play. There's only three buttons (four if you're tagging in other characters) but it's still a competent Souls-like, taking clear inspiration from FromSoft's flagship IP - a combat roll, environmental storytelling, an Ornstein and Smough boss fight, the ability to use a bow for which you carry surprisingly few arrows. In all seriousness, It could stand to have a little more enemy variety thrown in - there's plenty of variance if you include mini-bosses and bosses-bosses, but the path to those bosses will inevitably be slightly different flavors of green dude: green dude shooting at you, green dude smoking, green dude carrying a stretche-- ahh.
I do wish the characters themselves were more unique, since a couple of them feel functionally identical, but the ones that stand out (again, the boomerangs) are genuinely fun to use and make the experience fresh when "gunboy with grenade" starts to lose its novelty. The experience overall is short enough that you probably won't get that tired of the player characters unless you're really goofing it up, but I do think it's worth mentioning since I tend to value variety pretty highly in games.
I'd like to say more, but I don't have a lot of top-down shooters of any kind under my belt, much less these older arcade-style games. Given that I wasn't expecting to like this at all going in, the fact that I've come out of the experience this positive is a testament to the strength of the core experience and its steep learning curve.
Reviewed on Oct 30, 2021