Nukezilla Review: A Shooter (Xbox Live Indie Games)

A Shooter is a game developed by a company. That company is named Sorcery Games. This is a review of that game. A Shooter is a side-scrolling shooter where you shoot things. You shoot things and get points. Then you shoot bigger things and get more points. Then the game ends.

Don’t worry, the rest of the review (and the game) are nowhere near as boring as that opening.

The blandly-titled horizontal shmup is an exercise in difficulty curves and bragging rights. A Shooter is pretty basic gameplay-wise. You control a space ship fighting off what must be evil space ships (why else would you want to kill them?) in a random nondescript galaxy. If you get hit three times (indicated by a life meter on your ship), you die. To help defend yourself you’ve got a simple blaster and bomb/deflection item. The blaster can be permanently upgraded on each level by destroying a pink asteroid. The upgrades change your simple blaster to a spread shot weapon, before adding two cannons to the side of your ship, allowing you to shoot in three directions at the same time, and finally one at the back. The weapon upgrades are nice and gradual, never making you feel weak or overly-powered.

Bombs are used a bit differently here than in normal shmups. Rather than destroy everything on screen, they wipe out any enemy bullets present. This makes them invaluable during boss fights, which can get downright crazy (more on that later). Bombs can be picked up by defeating end level bosses, and destroy bullets in various ways. One just erases them from the screen, and another turns them all into point-gaining fruit. It’s definitely a different take on traditional shmup bombs, and one I’d like to see implemented in other such games.

This game gets damn, damn hard. At the beginning you won’t have to worry much about enemies, as they’re simple blue stars and orange cruisers (pots of gold and rainbows, and the red balloons!) that seem more like a distraction than enemies. As the levels progress enemies grow in size and difficulty, and even the older enemies get nastier and shootier. As do the end level bosses. Sure, all are just palette swaps of each other, but later levels see these once-docile bosses become bullet-hell-like monsters, filling the screen with doom.

Like all other games on Xbox Live that find one necessary, this game has a leaderboard. This might not seem like a big deal until you hear about the contest Sorcery Games is running. On certain days over the coming weeks they’ll take the highest scorer on their leaderboards and send them an exclusive t-shirt. Game creator Da VoodooChief told me that “part of a heart of a shooter is the high scores, so creating a shooter and then running a competition based on highest score seemed to be a real good match. Hopefully this will create some healthy competition.” Competition is a big focus for the game; at the end of each level A Shooter asks you if you basically want to brag about your new score to people on your friends list.

For 80 MS points (or 160 Bing searches) I see no reason to pass this up if you’re a shmup fan. It controls pretty well, it takes some shmup conventions and turns them on their head, and if you’re good enough, it can net you a free t-shirt. If you want in on the contest, be quick: the second of four shirts will be given out tomorrow night at 9 PST. See if you can beat my score (I’m Pendelton21), and I’ll see if I can beat yours!

Disclaimer: Nukezilla received a review copy of the game from Sorcery Games.