• Velocity®Ultra
  

  3 hours playtime

  10 of 31 achievements

This is a vertical collectathon SHMUP. You can move around the screen and fire straight up by holding A, though what you’ll be doing most is collecting blue pods scattered throughout each stage; if you make it to the end without getting enough, you straight-up lose and have to retry the stage. There’s also a time limit, but for the most part, you can get all the pods and reach the end of the stage without running out of time. You can hold R to speed up the autoscroll, but it makes the screen scroll absurdly fast (is its speed based on the monitor’s refresh rate?), to the point where the only way to survive with it on is memorization or tool assistance, so you won’t be using it often. Similarly, controls are also much too sensitive to match the breakneck speed of the scroll boost: the tiniest, quickest tap of the left stick sends your ship several ship-lengths in the direction you pushed, so it isn’t uncommon to for you to try to move out of the way of enemy shots, only to slam directly into another enemy or turret and die before you even know what just happened.

This all comes to a head in the lightning-bolt stages: all of them have super-low time limits that force you to keep the scroll-boost active for basically the whole level (except one of them where I guess the dev just forgot to lower the time limit). Not only does this mean you have to memorize where all the ceilings are so that you don’t crash into them, but the game also has a teleport mechanic: hold X to bring up the cursor, move it to another spot on the screen (with the left stick, meaning your ship is completely stationary during this process), and release to teleport there…unless the cursor was overlapping a wall (even slightly), at which point nothing will happen. Plus, the cursor’s movement is just as sensitive as the ship’s, which means you’d want to line the ship up first since the ship can’t go in walls, but the cursor will still register as being in front of the wall if the ship is too close to the wall when you hit the button, adding extra headache to what would appear to be a straight shot. By the way, not only do you have to avoid regular ceilings and teleport past full ceilings without disabling the too-fast-to-react scroll boost for too long, the game also has force fields you need to disable: shoot the numbered blocks in the right order, or else the force field stays up (and force fields kill you on contact, as opposed to ceilings which just crush you between the bottom of the screen). Also, you have to hit the number blocks from the correct side (whichever side has the exposed blue electricity), and to do that, you need to shoot bombs with the right stick. In other words, the lightning-bolt stages not only require several retries just to memorize the layout, but they also require switching between twinstick mode and face-button mode at near-instantaneous speeds.

But that isn’t even the worst part of the game. Turns out, you can’t just take your time collecting the blue pods in the regular levels either because progression isn’t based on how many blue pods you’ve collected, but on your total points. Even if you’ve technically beaten levels 1 through 39, you can’t play level 40 until you’ve gotten 4000 points. For reference, getting all the blue pods in a level only gets you 60 points, and just beating a level under the given time limit is 20 points. You could try for getting a high score within individual levels, but that only gets you 30 points max per level. The only other way to get more points is to beat levels in a time only attainable through tool assistance. This is the kind of crap that makes me not want to buy games anymore; how was I supposed to anticipate a SHMUP would have grinding?

If it weren’t for the progression system or the lightning-bolt stages, this game would’ve been okay at best, but as it is, I can’t recommend it.