Shooter Game - Gomie vs. 2015

[Gizmog]

I chose to review this based on the name, figuring it'd be a relatively easy one. Boy, was I wrong! This is a fast-paced and well designed shooter. A few tiny flaws detract from it in the long term, but with a few tiny changes it could be the best action game in OHR History.

Shooter Game takes impressive advantage of the latest OHR features, running at 440x400 resolution and a steady 30 frames per second. It is also literally relentless. You have no control over when the game starts and as soon as you die you're three seconds from the game starting again. No pausing, pausing is for cowards.

You play a guy.. I'm gonna call him Shooter Man. ShooterMan moves around smoothly with the arrow keys while you point his guns with your mouse. The sprite rotates to face the direction your mouse is going, and the bullets originate from the guns on the sprite. It doesn't sound like much, but ShooterGame gets it right and that's not as easy as it sounds.

ShooterMan's problem is that he's surrounded by 4 techno-lookin doohickeys that keep spitting enemies at him. His enemies don't have guns and instead cowardly try to ram their mechanical shells into his fragile body. Your goal is to keep ShooterMan from getting rammed by dodging and shooting the enemies, while trying to find enough time to put some holes into the techno-lookin doohickeys that are breeding the enemies in the first place.

It's hectic enough just trying to stay ahead of the enemies but once you eliminate the first T-LD, it gets even worse. I can't tell if the rate of enemy spawning increases, or if it's just focusing the same amount of enemies through a smaller amount of T-LDs, but suddenly you've got more to shoot at.

A big part of the game is controlling territory. When you're in the middle of the screen, you've got a lot of places to dodge. You are surrounded, yes, but you're also the farthest distance you can get from the T-LDs which gives you freedom. Once you've sacrificed the middle, you'll find yourself in a corner and in a corner the enemies can pop up virtually right on top of you. Destroying the TLDs opens up more territory, but that can work in the enemies favor as well: They no longer have to navigate around the damn thing to get to you.

Additionally, the increased number of enemies means that it's now harder to hit the T-LD through all the crowd. You spend more of your time shooting and dodging and less of your time whittling them down.

The best strategy is to concentrate your efforts on just one of them and then take out its partner, giving you half of the map. Then, you should divide your efforts between the remaining two so that you can kill them both as close together as possible.

The enemies are the perfect size for the map, they're big enough that they're hard to dodge but easy to shoot. When they're cornering you it is super tense and I had some white knuckle escapes (and a fair share of valiant deaths). Sometimes they jitter back and forth a little, and there's a spot or two on the floor where you can get some of them "stuck" and piled up on each other. Good luck shooting down that stack of 20 when they get free though!

Shooting is so smoking hot, there are so many bullets firing out and the little smoke-puff effect when they hit something is physically arousing. It makes the vanishing act the T-LD's pull seem boring in comparison and I would've liked some kind of boom when you bring one of 'em down.

Another thing made painfully obvious by the bullets flying around is that there's no sound effects! It makes the action feel eeriely quiet, and while a constant boom-boom-boom might've gotten annoying over time, it's virutally a tradition for the genre. The music loops back to the start every time that you die (and you are gonna die) which is irritating and makes do-overs more tedious than they oughta be. Plus, the song itself is a slow-paced piano thing. It should be something up-beat, action-packed (like Uptown Funk.midi). There should've been additional songs or it should've just kept going on and on rather than looping back.

The other thing that frustrates me is that there's a mandatory "Game Starts In..." countdown before every try. I want to re-try NOW, not 3 seconds from now! Or maybe I want to catch my breath first. This would've been a lot better with a "Press Enter" prompt to start.

Each T-LD has a health gauge displayed on the right side of the screen, though the game never tells you that it's their health gauge. You just have to shoot them and notice the decrease. It also doesn't tell you which gauge belongs to which T-LD, which can make for a little bit of guessing. I wonder why the gauges aren't directly on their respective T-LD, would've made 'em look that much more Techno and Devicey.

My biggest knock against the game is the lack of an ending. After having a really hectic experience to knock down all the Techno-Looking Devices and take out the last enemy, nothing happens. The game timer doesn't even stop. ShooterMan just runs around his newly emptied brick home. After all that action I was expectin somethin, man! It's terrible when your last memory of a game this good is one of disappointment.

Shooter Game is so good that I can't hold those little faults against it. It's exciting, it's strategic, it's fact-paced. Everything you look for in a game. I know I say it about a lot of games, but it really does remind me of the shareware stuff I used to play as a kid. I'd reccomend this game to anyone, and BlurredVisionGames was cool enough to include his scripts so everyone can learn from his expertise. Damn good work!