The sequel to “Tail Gun Charlie” (obviously) and like the last one, it’s a 3D take on a classic game. This time, another old favorite of mine, Defender.
Your job is to go from planet to planet to aid a ship dropping terra forming pods protecting them from an alien race known as the Noxin. If you lose all your pods, the planet will be destroyed.
When I first saw the video for this, I thought “well, that looks pretty cool. And that little minimap up top looks damned familiar” then I found Tail Gun Charlie and got the names mixed up because they’re so similar and thought “Ok … this is alright but it’s nothing like the video”. Then this got released recently and, yeah.
It does borrow heavily from Defender in the sense that you’re moving around the terrain saving these little terra forming pods from being destroyed. But it’s also much different in the fact that it’s in 3D and you can shoot more than one shot at a time. And it can get insanely fast paced. Something that I like a lot.
Graphically, this game is pretty impressive. The different planets have their own looks to them, the overall environment looks great, the different types of enemy ships are modeled excellently … although your own ship doesn’t look all that great. Though it’s not perfect. Due to your point of view and the very short horizon it’s a little difficult to line up your shots and takes a bit of getting used to. And some of the enemy ships are a bit hard to see because they blend in with the surroundings somewhat. But it looks like the developer was thinking of that because by default there’s a HUD view that highlights them for you, which can be turned off. But when you do the enemies are a pain to see sometimes. And while you do have to kind of deliberately do it, the frame rate PLUMMETS when there’s a hell of a lot going on onscreen. But the way the game paces itself you’ll likely rarely ever encounter this problem. And the explosions. The explosions for the smaller enemies are impressive, but once you blow away the huge Beetle ships and the mothership, you get some very impressive stuff. And if you lose the planet to the aliens, the planet blowing up is awesome. And the Noxin Mother Ship itself looks awesome on it’s own.
The sound is a mixture of techno music and 80′s inspired sound effects that fit the game rather nicely, and the explosions sound suitably awesome. It can get a little weak here and there, but overall you probably won’t be paying too much attention to really notice.
The gameplay is much like you’d expect from a Defender style game. You run around shooting everything in site. It handles like a typical first person or third person shooter (depending on which camera angle you go for). The analog sticks control your movement, either the right trigger or the A button fires your main gun, and either the B button or the right bumper fires off a massive bomb that will either destroy or severely damage any enemies that are unfortunate enough to be in it’s pretty large range. Hitting the left trigger will change your point of view from third person to first person and vice versa. And the following camera can be adjusted to suit how far back or up close you want it. The gameplay itself, as I said before, can get insanely fast paced in the fact that your little ship can MOVE. You can make it from one end of the map to the other in a few seconds if there isn’t terrain in the way if you really want to. You knock the terra forming pods around to group them together if you want to to make them easier to defend, but to put them into warp gates where you can just warp to a further up planet. Though I’ve never personally done it. But there is a severe flaw in the gameplay. I’m the type, I go after the biggest enemy first, and that’s always the mother ship. If you take that down, the nasty little bastards that grab your terra forming pods have nowhere to take them. So in the end, you destroy the mother ship first, then go around and take care of everything else. And I found that when I hit level 15, my shots were taking down the normally very hard to beat enemies in nothing flat, almost completely eliminating the challenge. Granted, this was on the easiest difficulty setting when this happened. If you want a real challenge, try the higher settings because the game gets damned hard. But still, that’s a pretty big problem.
6.0 – I like this game. Repetitive? Yes. Because you’re doing the same thing every level, only each level adds to the number of enemies you have to kill. But I’m an old school gamer, and I don’t mind the repetitiveness of this game, and at 3 bucks it’s damned well worth it. It could have used a multiplayer mode. Just imagine an 8 or 16 player game with people running around trying to snatch pods from the opposing team. The reason I’m giving it a 6 is because, in the end I have to give it an objective score. And that severe mothership problem I mentioned earlier (which can be remedied by just ignore the thing until it’s the last enemy) is a pretty big deal. And add to the fact that it hasn’t saved either my settings OR my high score. Even though there is a high score list in the game. Maybe it’ll get fixed with a patch sometime soon. I hope. Because despite those problems it’s still a pretty fun little game. I personally can’t wait to see where Charlie ends up next time. :)
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#1 by Duckocide on October 4, 2009 - 6:14 am
I’m surprised it didn’t save your high scores or settings. That sounds like a bug although if you have a single strorage device, it should have saved it there automatically :( If there is more than 1 storage device, it should ask you to select one.
Interesting comment on the Mothership. I wanted to make it so that you could destroy it. I tried to balance the option of going staright for the mothership vs defending the pods. As the levels progress, it is meant to tip in the Noxin favour. I.e. the number of pods you lose whilst trying to destroy the mothership is unsustainable over several levels. That said, having things on easy is “easy” : )
Glad you liked the game. …Many thanks for the review.