Genre: Shoot-‘em-up
Platform: PC (Steam: $5.99)
Developer/Publisher: Astro Port/Capcom
Difficulties played: Easy (cleared) Normal (cleared) Hard (my ass still hurts)
Among one of my more recent forays into the “humble indie bundle” territory, which everyone who games on PC should get acquainted with if they aren’t yet, I bought a ~$4.50 worth of indie titles, or, to be more exact, $4.50 worth of indie SHMUPS and a platformer. One of them was Satazius – though, to be honest, it was one of the bigger incentives to pick up the bundle, as I did it exactly after watching the trailer linked above. Come on, it’s a SHMUP straight from the 32-bit era! Or, at least it looks so. See Darius Gaiden for the SEGA Saturn for reference.
Unlike Darius however, the story is not original, nor does it even matter. The game begins quickly, without a cutscene or a text presentation of the story, as soon as you select a difficulty and set of weapons. With the (huge) explosion of your mothership, the game starts off… though you can still catch up on the story on the game page on Steam or see a bunch of details on the ships in the game with steam trade cards. Note: it’s the standard (or, classic?) space pirate story.
The weapon collection. Personal recommendations (left to right) - main weapon 3, sub 3 and 4, charge 2 or 3. You'll start off with less weapons than this of course, but luckily most of my recommendations are available at the beginning.
The game process is just about as simple as it gets. Avoid getting shot down (and one shot is enough), pick up powerups for your speed, shield, main, secondary, and charge weapons, don’t crash into walls, rocks, ledges and other stuff. If reading that makes you think about Gradius, then yes, it is exactly like Gradius in many gameplay aspects… there’s just a LOT more explosions.
What Satazius does, it mostly does well. While the game is short (offering six levels), raising the difficulty remixes them well enough that they don’t become boring. Most weapons are fun to use, and are balanced for various situations – taking down one powerful enemy, or exterminating a horde of little ships just by holding down the fire key (or button, if you’re using a gamepad) while avoiding their bullet clusters. The game is extremely colorful, and the explosions never cease to amuse in their plentiness.
This is what we live for!
Environmental hazards are mostly a fun break from raining down bullets and lasers to get yourself through, and they are quite varied – between avoiding getting smashed by rocks to making it to the goal before you’re crushed or shot down in pursuit. However, as the difficulty rises it can (and probably WILL) get frustrating sometimes – which brings me to my next point.
One of the elements in raising the difficulty is that the cheapness of the game also rises. Heavily so, in fact. This has less to do with walls of enemy fire that can appear on “hard” difficulty, as anyone who has made it so far will probably be able to deal with it, even if after a little bit of pattern memorization, but it has to do much more with annoying tricks pulled by the environment – extremely unpredictable gate patterns and overly fast (even by platformer standards) moving platforms, among other things, might become the source of frustration and some ragequits, and worst of all, they disturb the flow of the game. As long as you’re patient however, you are not left without solutions.
The game offers plenty of continues (nine continues x 3 lives, to be exact), an extra life every 300000 points, and a practice mode where you can pick any stage you unlocked on the respective difficulty, and pick any power level of weapons that are unlocked on that particular stage. Provided that you’ve taken patience in tow, you could sharpen your skills and memory to the point where you can just about breeze through any level. The level of frustration is a bit subsided thanks to that, even if it's still very much there.
Ironically, a flying mechanical crab is something that you WILL want to see after the part of the level that led to it.
Other than the collection of paragraphs above (many, if you consider we’re talking about a SHMUP here), there is not much to say. The game plays OK with a keyboard, but I would heartily recommend a gamepad (having played the game with a PS3 controller). The music is pretty damn good and doesn’t drone on you after a while. The sound effects are perfect. Considering the game aims for a classic look, the graphics are also well-done. Overall, I would judge the game by three metrics…
Worth playing? Absolutely.
Worth $5.99? No.
Overall? 7/10
Keeping the summary short, the game is easily worth your time (it took 5 hours and 40 mins of mine, if you believe Steam), but at the price of $5.99, however little it is, it’s probably too short and doesn’t have enough replayability to be worth that – but hey, it’s an indie game on steam, meaning you’ll see a bunch (lots!) of various sales for it, and chances are you will be able to get it just like I did, for barely any money along with some other games.
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This is my first review (hopefully, of many) in a while now. Critcism on how to make it more readable and engrossing is very welcome, as are other suggestions (as to formatting, for example). Thanks for taking the time, hopefully you get the game :3
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