AlienCrush

Intro

"Alien Crush" is an arcade shooter developed by JSxero using Game Maker Studio that serves as his first and only submitted game to this site. Unfortunately this game isn't that good in my opinion. To be fair, that tends to be the case for most first projects, but this game feels like it suffers from a rather fundamental flaw in terms of design which makes playing this game well extremely boring. Though, I suppose I'll save that for the gameplay section.

Gameplay

At first glance this looks your standard space shooter. Unfortunately it suffers from several flaws that really undermine it in my opinion. For starters the ship doesn't continuously fire if you hold down the d key which serves as the key for firing your standard weapon. Secondly most of the enemies in this game take over four hits to kill which is a problem since enemies in this game tend to rush across the screen at varying angles toward the bottom of the screen. So you really don't have a lot of time to rack up hits. Thirdly the best use of your power up isn't to fire your one-hit kill missiles at enemy targets. Instead it's better to take use of the fact your defense massively increases while in this state in order to soak up a lot more fire before you run out of health and lives. Fourthly the best method for farming points in this game for a high score is to avoid combat and pick up the orbs that spawn in and are worth 30 points. This is the primary method I used to achieve a high score of 2,434 points.



So the best way to play this game about shooting invading alien spaceships is to not shoot them for the most part. Though, I did take advantage of the fact one of the enemies that pops up and is worth five points dies to a single shot of your standard weapon, but even those kills were mostly kills of opportunity since it was going to fly past me anyway as I tried to weave my way around the screen in order to avoid enemy attacks. Finally the game lacks a high score table. So the only way to keep track of your high scores is to write them down or take screen shots and store them somewhere on your hard drive.

Graphics

Graphical the game is alright for a simple space shooter in my opinion. Admittedly the enemy roster list is rather limited, but if your actively trying to kill your enemies most sessions for this game will only last a handful of minutes anyway. It's only when you play this game with the goal of setting a truly outrageous high score that the lack of enemy variety becomes truly noticeable in my opinion.

Sound

The game is almost entirely devoid of sound. The only exception to this rule is a sound effect that plays when a spaceship is destroyed. A game like this really needed a rocking soundtrack since it's not like this project can fall back on narrative fulfilment in order to keep the player invested.

Conclusion

"Alien Crush" is a game about blowing up alien spaceships where it's in your interest to not do so. A factoid so weird it boggles my mind. As for how this could have been fixed. The most obvious answer would have been to make the enemy ships less durable so the player doesn't have to worry about getting slammed into while trying to shoot them down. At the same time this was a first time project and using a program that doesn't allow the developer to do certain things unless they pay for it.