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Mixing together a smattering of early shooter elements with some modern feel, Shootvaders lacks an identity of its own
There’s no question that I love classic arcade games and I also tend to enjoy modern games that borrow elements from them to remix gameplay in order to make something new and different. Shootvaders, unfortunately, doesn’t really take enough big steps to clearly do something interesting and exciting though, settling for just being mildly unique at best. At its base combining the likes of Galaxian and perhaps a bit of Space Invaders in terms of the number of enemies on-screen, you’ll be tasked with blowing up all of the alien craft on every screen, moving you on to the next. For the most part the hook is that you’ll be able to grab power-ups that will fall plentifully along with health and money, and since any upgrades you get are only temporary you’ll want to keep grabbing them. The challenge comes in with the fact that while you can flip the falling power-ups to be something else in terms of weapons everything you grab is random (outside of being either alien or human). This means you’ll need to almost constantly adjust to whatever it is you have to work with, and that does make for a mild challenge. The problem is that it just seems content to simply stick with that and do little more, for the most part then counting on you being hooked and trying to get a higher score. There are simply more ambitious offerings, or even just ports of classics, that outshine this pretty modest effort.
Justin Nation, Score:Fair [6.1]