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Gameplay is focused on shooting enemies flying and floating around within a cave, but you’ll also need to concern yourself with the potential for falling rocks that will damage you as well. Periodically power-ups will appear, offering you invincibility, rapid fire, or bombs to help you out briefly. Getting ready to move on to a new level will trigger a quake, and when that happens you’ll see 4 yellow indicators on the screen which you’ll only have a relatively brief opportunity to destroy before it’s an automatic game over. The central gimmick, carried over from Toast Time, is that it’s not simply a twin-stick shooter, where you’ll use the left stick to move and the right stick to aim. Instead, your movement is a function of recoil from shooting your weapon. What you end up needing to do is to alternate between shooting to move, and then planting yourself in place to take aim and shoot things up. The result is certainly different, and opens up a new sort of challenge, but it can also be frustrating and a bit disorienting. Perhaps if moving or being stationary were 100% at your discretion it wouldn’t be as bad, but since you can’t stay in one place for very long before you’ll lose your hold you’re constantly shifting your focus. You basically have a brief window to get set, scope out enemies, shoot at them, and then return focus to your ship to plot out where you’re going next. The mobility issue becomes an even greater problem once you get to level 6 and the space you’re occupying grows larger than your screen. At that point when you’re trying to rush to shoot or run into the 4 targets that can be pretty spread out the task can begin to feel a bit cruel. Add to that stability problems that crashed my game a solid third of the time I got to that point and it’s hard not to walk away aggravated. In the end I’m not positive why the rules for the game are set this way, or at least there aren’t variant modes that simply change things up a bit. As configured, even where classic arcade games are inherently stacked against you Neon Caves ends up being too much too soon. For there not being much to it in terms of fundamentals, it sort of stumbles on itself when it comes to trying to be fun and even as someone who lives on roguelikes the very random nature of luck often seems more in control of your fate than skill. If you’re up for something different it may be worth a look, but expect some aggravation to go with it.
Justin Nation, Score:Bad [5.5]