Guardian is a planetary defence game reminiscent of games such as asteroids where you control a satellite orbiting a planet which is being bombarded by asteroids comets and aliens.
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When you start this game up you are presented with a developer logo which doesn’t immediately instil you with confidence as it seems a bit low quality and no where near optimised enough for a television screen, however that soon fades and you are presented with the game logo and a spinning earth-like planet in the background and somewhat eerie space music, which gives it a higher quality edge over that of most indie games.
Once you get onto the main menu you are presented with New Game, Continue Game, High Scores Options, How to Play and Exit. How to Play gives both a tutorial which is better than most indie tutorials in that it shows you all gameplay elements but without over bloated explanations. There is also a Demo option which plays an automated game.
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Options give you the ability to turn Music, Sound Effects and Vibration on or off and choose from a selection of 3 pre-set controller profiles, Pretty much all the other options are self explanatory so onward we go to New Game.
You are given the option of Single Player or Cooperative play, then a selection of four difficulty levels, Easy, Normal, Hard and Legendary, the game is quite simple you are constantly spinning around the planet and have a cursor to aim your shots, you have two modes of fire primary and secondary.
There is a continual amount of asteroids and comets being drawn towards the planet and some randomly moving across the screen or close to the planet to destroy you. The game is over once your base at the center of the planet is destroyed, the planet has a shield around it that can take about 4 hits and slowly recharges, when that’s down any damage will break bits off the planet until the base is reached.
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Each level has a certain amount of objects to destroy, once they are reached you move onto the next level. You have a primary weapon which is fast and weak, and a secondary weapon which have limited ammo but is very powerful.
The game concept is not bad but it lacks in pace, the length of time it takes to revolve around the planet is somewhat annoying but the truly annoying thing that really makes it seem slow is how long it takes to move the cursor across the screen, it seems like an eternity which by the time you get it to where you want it your no longer in the right orbit to be able to shoot there anymore.
I believe just speeding up the cursor movement would greatly improve the momentum of the game and make it a much more enjoyable experience. The game is of a rather higher quality as mentioned before compared to other indie games, the graphics are reasonably good, and the little nuances such as the animations on the menu and seamless transitions between the title screen, menu and main game add a nice level of polish to it. The sound effects work well and the music works pretty well too, the only thing that doesn’t work is the Italian sounding music track which seems a bit out of place.
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I did find one bug in the game, where if you leave it on the title screen too long it comes up with an unexpected error, I believe this results from the timeout on the main menu where it automatically starts a demo running if it is left idle, it seems to try starting this from the title screen but fails.
If the developers tweaked the speed issue it would definitely be worth the 240 :MSPoints: the game costs. The only real downside to it is the slowness, other than that everything seems to be done well, even the text is big and readable unlike a lot of games which don’t pay attention to details like that.
Review by CyberAxe.
You can find out more information about Guardian as well as download the trial and full versions on the Marketplace.
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