Textshmup

I saw this on the main page some time ago and thought "awesome". It took a while until I decided to actually boot it up though. It's a pretty simple game to review unless there's some hidden secret once you live for five minutes (which I didn't manage in ten plays).

Maybe there are boss fights. It's not like I would notice since I'm busy typing FIRE FIRE MISSILES CHARGE GUARD SHIT SLOW SLOW SLOW.

I love this concept. Somehow it's different with these kinds of commands than just pressing a button and making stuff happen. It's a more abstract experience and it reminds me of the board game Space Alert. Essentially I always find the idea of sending out orders rather than doing the actual doing to be very exciting.

So while playing this I saw myself as a sweating commander listening to a guy watching a radar screen and shouting what happened while I had to decide what to do and shouting that to someone else that would then do what I told them to.

That was the good things. The game is very immersive.

Then the bad things. Or things that wasn't exactly to my liking. The game is very difficult. I don't think I survived more than three minutes on any of my playthroughs. It's not a big deal since you can easily restart the game with as much effort as it takes to fire a gun. But still the game's frantic pace gets annoying after a couple of plays. It's hard to keep track of what's happening and what's important to keep track of.

The game's complete reliance on text does eventually hurt it. The colour cues are not clear enough. The only ones I really noticed were when the shields were down (deep red) and when I scored points (bright green). Other visual cues would have helped instead of being forced to read the whole text all the time. And although it's a text based game in the end I think it could have been doubly awesome if it actually had some graphics while keeping the text-based input.

Of course it's a 24-hour game so I assume that there's virtually hundreds of things that could have been improved with a bit more time (or perhaps not time but you know... development). There was also a debug message that kept coming up every time I quit.

So essentially the concept is awesome. The execution is unobtrusive and immersive and all kinds of other good words people spew out nowadays. But there's also a lot of room for improvements, improvements I'd actually love to see if there ever was a sequel or remake.