• Gamma Bros
  

  32 minutes playtime

  4 of 6 achievements

This is a SHMUP. You move with the D-pad and shoot down with A, but after a few minutes, you’ll realize you can shoot in all the cardinal directions by using the other face buttons as well. Level design just consists of waves of enemies coming at you from various sides of the screen and their varied flight formations; it’s almost like Galaga since the ships will often just come to a standstill after grouping up (though you also get plenty of the more common fly-by enemies). It’s not bad, but I did start to wonder if it was an endless roguelike until I made it to the first boss: three slightly larger ships that take many more hits to defeat. They have different attacks to choose from when they fly in, and when they leave, you can see their shadows in the background, indicating where they’ll fly in from next. After that, it goes back to the enemy waves (even the background is the same as last time), though there are some new enemy types, and I think more enemies come in at once. After a while, you’ll make it to the second boss, which is just a drone that can shoot a spread shot and spawn more enemies; it takes much less time to defeat than the first boss. Then there are some more enemy waves, though at one point, it just kinda starts spamming them from all directions; you’ll almost certainly get hit and take damage, but the extra enemies mean more get killed, which means more health pickups spawn, so I still didn’t die here. Finally, you reach the final boss; it has around three different phases or so (and can even spawn regular enemies at times), but the most annoying part is that this fight introduces tiny + shaped projectiles that chase you. You can shoot down enemy missiles, but not these things that only just got introduced at the very end. I did die against the final boss, but the game just respawned me (with no indication of how many lives I had), so I was still able to beat the game on my first run.

Overall, this one’s okay for a free game. I can recommend giving it a chance if you don’t have much else to play.