On the surface, this is just another flash game, high on style and attitude, low on mechanics and replayability. But once you've been playing it for a bit, you start to realize just how hard the developer is trying to force Flash to be something that it isn't... to deliver an aesthetic experience that the platform just can't manage. At least not on my system, and not with this level of optimization.
The controls are responsive, but you're almost never in a position to fire your gun. There's always something too close, especially when you're first dropping into a mosh pit fulla enemies. You can't press down and jump at the same time to drop down to another level, so it makes you wonder why they didn't just make Up an alternate jump. No in-game explanation of the controls. Yeah, I see it up there now, but when I was playing the game and forming my first impressions, I had no idea all those other buttons existed. I found the arrow keys and A and S and assumed that was the whole game.
The camera absolutely hates you. It's slow to react to your movements, and there's always blurry crap in the foreground. When are retro side-scrollers going to stop doing this? We had the technology in 8-bit Nintendo to layer crap in front of the playing field, guys. There's a reason we didn't use it. Tiny things in the foreground giving an illusion of depth = more immersion. Giant things in the way that make you think "god dammit why do the game developers hate me so much" = LESS immersion. All you had to do was not make your stupid "I wish I was directing a movie instead of making a video game" cinematic bullshit not fuck up the gameplay. Shakey-cam might have been okay if it had a purpose, but here it just felt abstract and floaty, with no real purpose other than to remind you that the developers figured out how to implement shakey-cam. It's not reserved for footsteps and earthquakes, and it's not used intelligently to simulate the feel of a handheld camera, it just shakes the fuck out of the camera at all times. Maybe there was a race condition happening between Flash's update speed and the code that accounts for camera movement, I don't know. It probably didn't help when the frame rate started to drop.
Which brings me to performance. Generally the bane of all Flash games, but particularly nasty when a developer tests their game on a next-gen rig without giving any thought whatsoever to optimization. In this age of Adobe trying to sabotage Flash's own legacy with increasingly buggy Flash Player releases, of developers abandoning the web as we know it in favor of mobile platforms that just don't want to run non-native code, and newbies pouring into both the developer space and userbase, you absolutely NEED to test your flash game on a shitty rig. I did not play this game long enough for it to really chug, but I could tell the unfinished garbage collection was starting to pile up. It didn't feel like a MovieClip game. There was too much stuff going on at once. Scrolling. Hordes of enemies. Frame rates would have started off in the crapper if they were relying on MovieClips for everything. But whatever they were doing for optimization purposes, they weren't doing enough of it. Maybe they needed to cache those blurred objects instead of applying a blur filter every frame. Maybe they just needed to lower the update rate in the Flash IDE so it has time to breathe and run Garbage Collection. Maybe they should have used dirty variables and Object Pooling to avoid creating and destroying objects at runtime. I couldn't speculate. But whatever they were doing for optimization, they needed to do better. This is not sufficient to allow the game to run at reasonable frame rates on my computers, and I've seen better Flash games get away with more in the past. I do appreciate the obvious use of delta-timing and the responsiveness of inputs.
So. More levels? More variety? Bosses? Upgrades? Collectibles? Sure, any or all of that stuff, if well-implemented, would have been nice to have. But I didn't even get to the point where I had time to realize how shallow the game was like other reviewers have said. I was too busy being put off by obnoxious foreground objects and enemy swarms that give me no real opportunity to slip in there and lay down some lead. Full points for style and a good-faith attempt at optimization. But I wouldn't go so far as to call it playable.
Lower the attempted frame rate to something like 20 and get rid of the foreground objects, show me all the controls when the game starts, or better still put in a MegamanX style first level where you need to use the moves to get through, and I could see playing this for another 5 or 10 minutes. If it's really just the one level as some reviews have said, I probably wouldn't have given it a much higher score, but I would have at least felt like the game wasn't talking over my head (system requirements) while saying nothing of interest (gameplay).
