• The Rush
  

  88 minutes playtime

  no achievements

This game was really close to being a great free shoot-em-up, but it makes a few notable missteps. First, although the game sets you back to a checkpoint when you die (in one hit), the game still has the gall to have limited lives (max you can set is 9). Also, although Training Mode lets you play any stage from the get go without having to reach it in Arcade Mode first, it still only lets you play a level from the start or from the boss rather than let you retry from any specific checkpoint between them. Sure, you can get around this by going to your AppData/Local/The_Rush_Laptop folder and opening the game’s settings file in Notepad to give yourself 999 lives, but this obviously wasn’t intended; the game was meant to be tedious for no reason, and it kills me that so many Shmups do this. Second, bullets can be kinda hard to see sometimes, especially since I’m pretty sure they get drawn behind your own bullets, so a lot of your deaths will be from shots you didn’t even see, and trying to do a blind play-through of Arcade Mode legitimately will get you a game over on level 2 or 3 (out of 8). Third, some of the enemies and hazards require trial-and-error before you’ll understand how they operate, like how the stage 4 boss shoots directly at you for every shot you land on it (something that nothing else in the game will do) or how level 7 has gates suddenly close when they reach specific points in the autoscroll (not always the same points that previous gates closed at).

Overall, there’s a lot of good here, especially for a free game, but the missteps still make it kinda hard to recommend.

• Funky Panic Attack
  

  53 minutes playtime

  no achievements

First-person platformer. Standard left stick to walk and right stick to look around, A button double-jumps, RT fires your freeze-gun (which you only get if you go through the tutorial) though the lack of reticle makes it hard to aim, Y advances dialogue, and RB toggles a mode where you move faster but constantly bounce. If you freeze a moving platform, jumping off of it will launch you in the direction that platform was moving when you froze it, which is an interesting concept, but it really just makes it kinda annoying to make the long jumps you’re expected to, especially when you only barely miss reaching the next platform despite having toggled on the fast-moving bouncing mode and double-jumped. Making those jumps feels a bit more like luck than skill.

Level design is pretty good. Checkpoints are frequent and hazards are fair. Only issues I had besides the aforementioned launch mechanic is that hazards can sometimes unfreeze faster than you expect and kill you when you’ve just moved past them and can’t see them anymore, and also the fact that frozen hazards still deal contact damage, but both of those are things you can get used to.

It’s also worth mentioning that the game ends very abruptly. The protagonist finds a picture of people who “look familiar,” and then nothing ever comes of that. Near the end, the protagonist mentions that she doesn’t sense what she’s looking for nearby, but then ten seconds later, you enter a door and find exactly that and the credits show up and you’re back to the title screen. It definitely feels like there were bigger plans for this game that fell through, and the demo for its sequel has an entirely new cast of characters, so unless I missed a hidden Easter egg somewhere, the questions raised by this game will remain unanswered (the secret area shown in the game’s only Steam Guide just raises more questions).

Overall, it’s okay for a free game, so I can recommend it.