PixelShips Retro

Posted by oddbob on September 23, 2006 · Lovingly Filed Under Other peoples games 
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What do you get if you cross Pokemon with Defender? Pokender? Defemon? A little yellow twat being blown to smithereens? Hmm, maybe some of the above, but you also get Pixelships Retro, the sequel to … well, Pixelships obviously.

Pixelships Retro is a concept that looks great on paper, a wraparound scrolling shooter where the aim is to clear off the goals presented to you each level, be that collecting the correct amount of coins, destroying x amount of enemy ships before the time limit ends in order to spawn a boss ship that you destroy, then get the ability to play.

Each boss ship has different qualities and brings its own pro’s and con’s to the table - some may move slower, some have firepower which diminishes in strength faster than others and so on and so forth. The more levels you clear off, the more ships available to you and the more you have chance to juggle the balance in your favour - each ship also has its own experience levels enabling you to upgrade the current ship as it hits the top of the experience scale.

So, indeed - a fairly solid and reasonable concept behind the whole game. Shame its not so wonderful in practice.

Its by no means a bad game or a poorly coded game… its just dull to play.

The enemy patterns are bland - they swoop around the screen occasionally arcing when within range of your ship, maybe doubling back if you’re lucky, firing out the odd bullet (which due to all the ships you pilot having energy levels, you can take huge amounts of hits from and still continue). So there’s next to no threat level at all. Even when you progress through the boss ships the patterns remain so similar as to not really ever be enough to retain interest for long. The collecting ships does add a little more “umph” to it, but for the most part - its only ones obsessive compulsive nature that could possibly drive anyone to “catch ‘em all”.

Its something that appears to be a reasonably common theme amongst some shooters, and especially rearing its head within the shareware market more than it should… whereas the absolute focus should lie in good enemy design, wave structures and/or threat balancing and risk/reward… so many of them take the base concept of “well, we’ve got a player and umm…lets throw a few enemies in without really thinking too hard about structuring their behaviour” that you wonder sometimes if half the people writing these games have ever played and enjoyed a shooter in their lives.

And the graphics? Pixelships Retro appears to run with the principle of only having the barest minimum of effort employed in the graphics department and then passing them off as old skool. Whereas I may have railed against the gameplay of Gamma Bros, they nailed the retro stylings down to an absolute tee with absolutely luscious sprites that show PixelShips Retro up at every turn.

The sound is nicely done, although having only been able to try the demo version out I appear to be stuck with an incredibly limited selection of music (possibly only the one track, but that might just be that it all blurs into one - so don’t quote me on that) - either way, there’s no Hubbard style epics to be found here but what is there is competent enough, if nothing special in the grand scheme of things

It all adds up to one major problem the game suffers - if it were a true retro game it would have been thrown out for a few quid on Mastertronic or Firebird - a nice distraction of a game, but never anything with much in the way of longevity. At $12.95 for the full version I’m not entirely convinced that any of the extra content on offer for upgrading from the demo justifies the price tag. When there’s a world of excellent shooters out there which either cost less, or cost nothing at all bar the time to download them, why cough up for something that barely scrapes its way out of the idea’s camp?

What could have been something a bit special has ended up as a husk of a game that feels like its trying to eek more playtime out of you with the collection mechanism rather than encouraging you to get bigger, better and more ships to control and use to blow seven shades of holy shit out of everything.

And we all know, that in a shooter - its the blowing shit out of things that matters.

PixelShips Retro - An exciting screenshot

A riot ensues as the elephant clambers into the public house and takes out the Guinness pump

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