devonrv

I keep telling myself I gotta be more careful about what giveaways I enter…but despite my efforts, I still end up entering giveaways for games like this:

  • Aircraft Sketch Shooter... more like *sketchy* shooter, am I right?

    2 hours playtime

    21 of 31 achievements

SHMUP. No mechanics besides moving, shooting, and bombs, but the bombs aren’t even screen-clearing; they only destroy enemies that are very close to you, closer than you’d expect given the explosion graphic. Powerups spawn (seemingly) randomly, though I did like how the game would always pop up a description of what the item does when it spawns so you aren’t blindsided by power-downs, especially the ones that aren’t red (or powerups that are red).

There is no level design or thought put into enemy placement and AI. Most enemies just shoot straight down, and of the few that do something else, most of them shoot directly at you. Also, because the game has nothing else going for it, difficulty is increased by having only one enemy type in the first level, introducing one more enemy type in each of the next few levels, then just spamming enemies more frequently once the game runs out of new enemies to introduce. Honestly, the only reasons this game is possible to beat is that it always spawns health pickups when you get hit, and if you die anyway, you can just continue right where you died with full health.

Compounding on this frustration is that ALL enemies move erratically from side to side, and since your own shots don’t move that fast, either, you have to get relatively close to hit them reliably and often (which you’ll want to do because of how many hits they take to die). This leads to a knock-on effect where you often aren’t able to react to the enemies’ colorless, tiny shots coming towards you, as they aren’t that much bigger than the stars in the background and are drawn behind your own, much larger shots. Plus, enemies can safely move into the rocks constantly on the left and right edges of the levels, but you can’t and take damage for trying.

Those aren’t the only problems, though. Although the game resembles an autoscroller, you can still scroll the screen around–even if you get the zoom-out powerup–which means enemies can be hiding and shooting you from offscreen. Stage bosses always appear at the halfway point of the level with half health, so you have to fight each boss twice since there’s no difference between their halfway-point pattern and their end-of-level pattern. The bosses’ patterns aren’t that different from the bland regular enemies, either; a few will fly across the whole arena for a bit, and one boss surrounds itself with little ships that respawn very quickly if you kill one, but that’s about it. The three “challenge” stages are just variations on endless mode: don’t get hit by the generic straight-shooters (that’s all this mode spawns); get as many powerups/downs as possible before you die while health pickups keep spawning; literally just a boss rush. That first one doesn’t even spawn any powerups, so the enemies are even more damage-spongy.

Not recommended.