A neat little 80 point retro inspired shooter … mix the left to right gameplay of Space Invaders and Galaga with bullet hell and you get Decimation X. An insane, fast paced, and sometimes infuriatingly difficult arcade shooter with support for up to four players locally.
Of course, there are a few bullet hell style shooters in the indie games section, but they generally fail miserably. This on the other hand gets it right. But if you’re looking for a walk in the park, this may not be your game.
And this is definitely a game. There’s no storyline anywhere to be seen, you could make one up yourself though. It doesn’t need it. This could easily be in an arcade machine from the 80’s or early 90’s.
The presentation isn’t mind blowing by any means whatsoever in regards to just the general graphics, but it definitely gets the job done with nice explosions, a frame rate that never dips regardless as to what’s going on. The enemies are very simple and rather neat looking due to that fact, easy to see shots that are a son of a bitch to dodge sometimes (but that comes with the territory). The simplistic sound effects work nicely with the overall look and feel of the game. There isn’t anything exactly wrong with it as far as the graphics and sound go, it’s just a bit basic. Oh. And the music. I could easily see myself just sitting back and chilling out to this techno soundtrack which really helped me to get into the game. I just couldn’t picture playing this without that kind of music.
Now to the gameplay, which is for me the bread and butter of a game like this. It’s a bullet hell shooter in every sense of the word. The screen will be FULL of them. All you do when you start the game is fight off wave after wave after wave of enemies that move left to right or right to left depending on how you want to look at it shooting. And not even particularly AT you, they just shoot. A LOT. You have the shields that they chip away at that provide a level of protection, which you could probably gather from the screenshots. But there is also a neverending supply of powerups that don’t do a whole lot with your weapon … but at the same time it does a hell of a lot. They mostly just increase the level of your attack over and over again in a seemingly endless array. Soon enough you’re going to be filling the screen with as many bullets as the damn enemies. And there is also a neat shield powerup that creates a large temporary area around your ship. And also the occasional powerup that will completely rebuild the onscreen shields. Being that it’s a bullet hell shooter, if you don’t like the idea of using pixel perfect accuracy to dodge bullets, this probably won’t be your game because that’s where it’s stifling difficulty comes from. It’s an extremely accessible game, ANYONE can play this thing. But it gets REAL hard REAL quick. The highest I’ve been able to make it so far is level 20. And judging from the trailer for the game the levels just go on and on and on into infinity. There is so much happening on screen at once it gets a little insane, which is why I kinda say it’s the Bayonetta of shooters for the 360 in the fact that from start to finish it just doesn’t stop … except in a few cases. The one big problem I have with the game is the fact that the entire game comes to a SCREECHING halt when you die. You explode, the enemies stop in their tracks and stop shooting, and your character makes his way slowly from the right side of the screen to the left side THEN you start playing again. I can understand WHY it does that, but it just takes me out of it a little bit having to go through that. That’s part of where the infuriating part comes in because of the game just stopping DEAD in it’s tracks when you die. I’’m more into “don’t stop the game when one dies. Just respawn them in the same spot with a few valuable seconds of flashing invulnerability”.
And the difficulty seems to ramp up pretty damn quick when you consider that it may only take you about 30 seconds to a minute clear a level. So after about 5 or 10 minutes of playing the game, if you’re as terrible at these types of games as I am you’re probably going to see “Game Over”. But if you’re also like me, you’ll probably keep coming back to it just because it’s fucking FUN. As I said before, this does have multiplayer support, but seeing as how it’s ONLY local I’ll never use it because I just don’t personally EVER do multiplayer sitting on the couch with someone else. I haven’t done anything like that since the 16 bit era of systems just because online gaming is so prevalent for me. Which is a big disappointment because this game with online multiplayer would rock. And it would be cool to see some screen filling boss, and maybe there IS and I just haven’t gotten far enough. But not encountering one isn’t really a big deal for me. But it would definitely add something to the game to see that every 5 or 10 waves. :)
8.5 – It’s simple, it doesn’t bother with any kind of story. It just sticks you straight into the game where you just try to survive as long as possible. It’s an insanely fun shooter that doesn’t try to be anything BUT that. It’s disappointing not to see online multiplayer however, and that brings the score down a bit. There is a high score list, and apparently that list will be global eventually, which is awesome and will also serve to remind me how TERRIBLE I am at these games when I start seeing people reach level 10 trillion or something. :) But yeah, this is THE best shooter in the indie games section of it’s type right now and is definitely worth a buy whether you’re into these or not. At only 80 points, what have you got to lose. You’ll either love it like I do, or you’ll play it, get pissed off at losing all your lives by about level 20 or 30 or whereever you do and go through it again just to get further. Hrmm … maybe I fall into both those categories.
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#1 by Jigsaw hc on January 17, 2010 - 1:29 am
I played it for a while this afternoon and had a blast. It is hard, but I’m looking forward to seeing some ridiculous scores when they add online leaderboards.
#2 by Matthew Doucette on January 19, 2010 - 8:20 pm
Thanks for the great review.
I’ll debate the death sequence here, for all those who care.
Death in games have become more and more easy to handle and easy to ignore. Death in our game MATTERS, because it’s a score-running game and every life matters to get the highest score. But in beta-testing, players play as if death doesn’t matter. What is wrong with them? They have gotten so use to playing games as being godlike that they have become weak in their gaming soul. Death matters in our games. It matters without us having to tell you, but we have to tell you. The short pause blasts it in your face that you died and it matters. Some gamers have complained about it, but they have no experienced the alternative, which is no pause at all. This pause was done not by accident, but by design.
We are considering shortening the sequence to find a happy medium, but making it shorter feels wrong to me as I am writing this right now. If you “pass by” the deaths, the game quickly ends from shoddy play and feels incomplete. It truly is unreal how gamers today are given a godlike status in their games. Xona Games is about challenging skill-based games… no surprise we are top rated and best selling in Japan over any other country (as predicted by us)!!!
#3 by Matthew Doucette on January 19, 2010 - 8:22 pm
*but they have NOT experienced the alternative…
#4 by Stefan Persson on January 20, 2010 - 1:03 pm
Nice to read the review and I was also happy to see that the music was mentioned. Xona Games’ approach to create games in the intense retro genre rhymes very well with the electronic music of Imphenzia and it’s been a fun game to produce the soundtrack for!