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A Shooter Review

A game entitled “A Shooter”, a rather uninspired name but is it an uninspired game? A Shooter is as I’m sure you’ve probably deduced a Shoot ‘Em Up of the horizontal persuasion.

The game starts off with a rather lack lustre title screen then a menu system that is reminiscent of the old dos days when you got programs with cool recursive algorithm animations bobbing all over the place. My only gripe with the menu is that they use a classic arcade font for most of it but use a rather horrid and hard to read cowboy/circus themed font for the options and such.

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The gameplay is what you’d expect from a shooter, you move around the screen shooting at enemies that appear. All in all there’s about 6 different types of enemies that I’ve seen during the course of the game; some enemies shoot forwards, some shoot directly at you. The game looks more like a vertical shooter on its side since all the ships are bird’s eye view instead of side on like you’d usually expect.

The first 4 levels are quite easy going; dodge the enemies, get to the boss and figure out the pattern to beat it. The game has a very retro feel to it like playing an old arcade game from the early 80’s, after the 5th stage things start to get a lot more challenging. The later levels (8 and 9), are themselves are very hard, I wasn’t able to make it past the 9th stage as by this point there’s so many enemies on the screen trying to kill you. It’s basically a maze of bullets it’s almost like having a flashback to R-Type.

You have three power-ups and gain a new one when you kill a boss but are limited to three at most. The three you start with by default stops all bullets for a short time and destroys all the bullets on the screen, you also get an apple power up which replenishes health and finally a question mark power-up which destroys anything within a certain radius.

You only get one life, but your craft does allow for three three hits before you die. Unlike a lot of games that limit your ability to continue, this game allows you to replay from the latest stage you’ve reached. If you get to stage 8 for example, you can replay it and you get to keep all the upgrades you’d have acquired by this stage too! Speaking of upgrades, you get one each level and it either makes your guns more powerful, spreads them out more or shoots faster, I should also note that the weapon seems like it should fire across the whole screen but doesn’t, an upgrade increases the range too and limited range works in this game in my opinion.

The graphics in general are not too bad, the player ship is the most basic graphic and all the bosses are just palette swaps, but I’m fine with that as each boss plays slightly differently and is harder each time. All the enemy craft have nice and clean graphics, and the background is just an animated starfield which works because it is animated, you can also change the size of the stars in the options. Musically it’s a little bland but not too bad, the worst track is when you win a level, the jingle is rather cheesy. The sound effects aren’t too bad either but maybe a little loud? I turned the volume down as the explosions were excessive.

At 80 :MSPoints:, (ever notice that the better games are cheaper?) I say go get this game. I think newcomers and veterans alike will find it challenging but fun regardless of the couple of downsides mentioned above.

You can find more information as well as the trail and full version of the game on the Xbox Marketplace.

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