misterhaan
  • Galactic Arms Race

    2 hours playtime

    4 of 50 achievements

i think i got this from a developer giveaway on steamgifts, but i also have it through the groupees be mine anniversary bundle. i guess my groupees key might still be active, but this game is terrible so whoever might have won it if i gave it away isn’t missing much.

i made two attempts at playing the campaign. for the first i was bored and slightly frustrated, and the second just plain frustrated. here’s some of the things that bothered me: the campaign gives you missions in a way that feels like a tutorial. i think i got as far as maybe 26 of 86, which made it seem like the whole campaign was going to be driven that way. the game’s main flaw is that it doesn’t present the information you need in a way you can use it. the mission text is hard to read because it just renders the text on top of the map with no background. plus it doesn’t pause when it’s time to read something and there appear to be very few places where you can be sure enemies won’t spawn and wander in. the graphics aren’t distinctive and my ship always points toward the top of the screen even as i moved sideways. it says it has a system to let you evolve weapons to however you like to play, but that also suffered from not presenting information adequately so i don’t even know what my options were there.

my second attempt at playing this game saw me not progressing at all in terms of missions. it took me a long time to reach the objective and then i died before i could even see it because it kept putting out such a dense a sea of high-damage particles (i could only take 3 or maybe 4 hits). maybe i was meant to grind levels and upgrades, but the fact that i couldn’t even get close enough to see the thing (often whatever was shooting at me wasn’t even on the screen) just felt unfair. maybe someone into bullet hell games would have felt different, but for me this was bad user interface paired with unsatisfying gameplay. i don’t think i’m going to touch this again.