Boring Space Shooter is another twin stick shooter, does the title live up to it’s name or is it reverse psychology? Read on to find out.
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We all know the twin stick shooter format by now, control a space ship flying around an arena, shoot spawned enemies, collect power ups and get as a high score as possible. Boring Space Shooter follows this format with one main change, time travel. By holding the A button you can rewind time which allows you to save your space craft should you collide with an enemy. You only get one life so the limited charge time rewinding feature is vital.
There are a couple of enemy types which do not appear to have any differing characteristics, they all share the same which is move in the general direction of your space ship. Spawning of the enemy ships is a problem, if you hang around sides or corners, which you are usually forced to do due to the chasing nature of the enemies, you will likely be killed by a spawning enemy without any warning. You find that in many games of this genre either enemies will spawn a distance away from the player, give the player notice with a spawning animation or simply make the enemy craft non deadly for a short period of time, unfortunately none of these are used in the game.
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There are four power ups in total which must be either shot or collected. The Blue Star adds 50 seconds to the timer and the Red Star gives you extra bombs, both can be shot. The Yellow Spider gives you extra points and the Green Spider will give extra Time Rewind Power if collected while a bomb is activated. Due to the hectic nature of the game and the small sprite size of the power ups I found them quite difficult to collect or knowingly shoot, so I usually just ignored them and hoped a bullet would catch them.
Boring Space Shooter has two game modes to play. Rush is a time based game where you start with five minutes to score as much as possible, the Blue Star will add 50 seconds to the timer. The Endless mode is basically a survival mode where you must stay alive for as long as possible and clock up that score. To be honest both modes felt pretty much the same as it was so hard I had trouble staying alive for any respectable length of time.
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Graphics are very basic with mostly small sprites to try and shoot, nothing really jumps out and grabs you, even the explosions are underwhelming. The music get repetitive after a very short period of time and will have you reaching for the volume, that is if the sound effects do not get to you first! The sound is very badly done with piano notes played, I think the author was maybe going for a dynamic song being created when you kill an enemy, but it does not work.
Presentation is something I picked up on in my trial impression, I did not actually know there was a time rewind feature until the author pointed it out. The instructions are hidden away on the options screen by pressing right on the joypad. The aim of the game, as is common with twin stick shooters, is to get a high score, there are no highscore tables in the game which I found disappointing
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I feel that with some more work and play testing that Boring Space Shooter could have been a good game, but in its current state it is horribly unbalanced. It is not one major problem with the game, but many minor ones which together make it a very short lived unenjoyable experience. Although the game costs 80 :MSPoints: it is hard to recommend when there are some great twin stick shooters which play much better for the same price.
You can find more information as well as download the trial and full version of the game on the Marketplace here.
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