From what I’ve seen, there’s been a bit of an over saturation of space shooters in the Xbox Indie Games channel. Almost every week it seems like there’s at least one shooter style game that gets a “Leave to Die” rating from our good friend njsykora.
Slingstar isn’t quite one of those, but it isn’t just your average shooter either. Instead of shooting things, it’s more based on physics and inertia rather than “hold down the shoot button” and “don’t die” (well, that is part of it…). The simple-yet-gorgeous art, soothing ambient electronica music, and simple concept make for a good wrapping for this interesting new take on the arena shooter.
Simple is Good.
Slingstar is relatively simple, instead of the basic shooty shooty dodgy gameplay of most sh’mups, it instead employs two inertia-driven satellites. This makes for a pretty different experience, it reminds me a bit of a game you’d play as a child, swinging a button or something tied to a string around knocking other objects off of a table.
My favorite (and, in turn, least favorite as I’ll go into later) part of the game is the amount of different types of enemies. You have your basic ones that just scuttle around the screen, some of them attack you, and others leave trails of lights (I hope that’s what they are) that you have to hit with your satellites before they are destroyed and disappear from the field. Some of my favorite levels included these enemies that could trap your satellites with a spider-web like ability, making the satellites move much slower, and sometimes only along a straight line.
Some of the “boss” encounters (which occur every 10 waves), however, were pretty uninspired. A few of them were pretty fun, including a giant octopus, an urchin, and a weird planet…thing. A few of the levels were just repeats of other bosses (namely the Octopus) with the foe just increasing in size or number. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it was just a little uninspiring to be a little excited to see what the next boss wave and only have to fight the one that you’ve already fought three times.
Physics requires precision
I’m of the opinion that when physics puzzles/gameplay are done right, it’s fantastic. Sometimes though, it can get really frustrating and a little gimmicky. Slingstar doesn’t suffer from being too gimmicky, but there are points when the satellites just don’t go where you want them to.
Sometimes when moving the ship around and trying to come to a complete stop, the ship would turn around and move back a little bit. I would guess that this is to simulate the pull of the satellites having a force on the ship, but I found it more annoying than cool. I’d be in the middle of a cloud of slow-moving enemies, and I’d want to stop for a second to recollect. Then the ship would move a couple of pixels to the right and the hitbox would touch an enemy, and I’d have to start the level over again. It’s a cool feature, having a somewhat true to life inertia effect, but it makes for irritating gameplay.
There were a few levels where I was just playing it over and over again to almost no avail, and when I did eventually complete it, it seemed like it was by a stroke of pure luck. Maybe I’m just terrible at the game, but some of the levels just seemed like such a spike in difficulty from the previous ones that I almost stopped playing. It also didn’t help that the power-up system is completely random, so sometimes a power-up will spawn in the middle of a cloud of enemies, and you can’t quite take them out, or something hits you in your stupor of “OMG POWER-UP!” and you have to start the level over again.
A few other things worth mentioning
- There’s a multiplayer/co-op mode. I didn’t get to test this out, as I don’t have more than one controller, and I’m a loser and don’t have any friends that were interested in trying it with me.
- There’s a contest going on for free copies of the game. Winners will be pulled daily from the people who beat the java version on the website (ends october 20th)
- Not sure if it was just my crappy CRT TV that I was playing it on, but some of the enemies/your satellites leave annoying trails on the screen. It’s probably just because the refresh rate on my TV is low.
You should play this game if…
… you’re interested in a new take on the arena shooter, with some pretty visuals and fun enemy types.
Final Score
A refreshing concept in an overdone genre on XBL indie games. Some little annoyances with the power-ups, but overall a solid experience.
Notes
We received this game for free.
I avoided this soley on the name alone. Was afraid of some singing bollocks.