Not really the kind of game I go for these days, largely alternating between games which I can play in 10 minute bursts or games which just leave me alone to pick up some flowers or something, but I’m really impressed with the style Recompile has going on.
There’s a really nice mix of the economical indie style and some grandstanding stuff and sure, it looks nice static. Look at this!
There’s a nice bit of Rez to the digital player avatar and that spider-like whatever thing appears to be some sort of Event Horizon meets the sadly abandoned but should have had a bigger audience 3d tool GroBoto. Yes, this is definitely a look, I like it!
I’d bailed out of last year’s trailer due to an aversion to trailers playing sad songs at me and, as is usual for me, I’d completely forgotten about the game until a post on the PlayStation blog a few days back. The post goes into a little more detail of how the game looks, complete with now obligatory animated GIFs to show off different parts in motion and yeah, okay, it’s a grand job visually alright.
https://gfycat.com/poorfittinghawaiianmonkseal
I don’t have a PS5 and my PC has just bitten the dust again so I doubt I’ll be getting round to it anytime soon but given I keep this damn site around to write about things that make me go ooh, this is a game that definitely made me go ooh.
Okay, I’ll admit it. It the glowing particles that got me. I may be old and tired but I’m still me. Just look at the lasers in this! Incredible!
There’s a lot of things I really enjoy in Captain Forever Remix. The way it transforms a curious retro styled sci-fi experience into a sister vs brother game is most definitely the biggest but ultimately, I’m also always going to be a sucker for really pretty things and Captain Forever Remix *is* really pretty.
It doesn’t really come off too well static but the spawn in sequence is a blink and you miss it nice touch, especially when you zoom the camera in. Then there’s who you fight. I got into a fight with a dog and lost. It’s not the first time but I think it’s the first time since Saboteur on the Speccy that it felt a bit like I’d just embarrassed myself. That’d never happen with cats, you always know you’re onto a losing streak with them.
It’s all done with a very playful This Is Make Believe On A Saturday Morning thing which lends the whole game a really joyous tone even whilst your carefully built modular craft is trashed by a goldfish. It’s probably worth mentioning that it has some great looking explosions too.
Captain Forever Remix is out now and is pretty much everything I’d hoped it would be. It paints a very human face on a previously cold and clinical videogame and in doing so makes it all the better.
Look, I’m not sure how I managed to make it through to 2020 and have nothing on here about Assault Android Cactus before now but it’s clearly incredibly slack of me because Assault Android Cactus is wonderful.
It’s been pretty wonderful for the near five years it’s been out there now too. I’ve been enjoying it on and off for most of those five years as well.
I’m not kidding when I say I’ve been slacking here. Five bloody years! Molyneux save me. It’d be excusable if it wasn’t one of my favourite things.
To be honest, I kind of know why I’ve been putting it off. It’s an easy game to do a mammoth injustice to because when you write it all down it’s easy to go “so, err, what?”. It’s an intimately familiar looking, familiar feeling videogame. It’s born of purest Dreamcast, not the Sega Blue Skies of a thousand UK Resistance dreams but the final gasp of the arcade at home before digital downloads changed so much. It *looks* like a Dreamcast game too, though obviously more as my memory would like to convince me of what the games looked like than what they really did. It’s got a vibe. It’s good. It’s committed. It deserves the right words.
There’s so much game there too. It’s positively abundant. Ridiculously so! Full on call the cops and arrest these people for making the rest of us look like we don’t put enough game in a videogame stuff. I’m not sure I’ve played a twin stick shooter that crams quite so much in and where so little of it feels superfluous.
Some of it is unsurprising – multiple characters with different weaponry, ridiculous cosmetic tweaks (normal head mode! JJ mode for when you need so much lens flare you can’t see the screen! More!) – it’s a lot but it’s kinda an expected lot.
What isn’t quite so expected is the amount of videogame scenes the game runs through. At times it feels like an A-Z of arcade videogame levels. Never pastiche, never a nod and a wink, videogame levels because there’s something the game can do with them. It reminds me of Mutant Storm Empire in that regard though much, much, much more focused.
Early on you find yourself riding a very videogame lift, you know the kind – it’s in a hundred or so FPS, a multitude of top down shooters, it’s in Valve’s Alien Swarm, even Destiny couldn’t resist the lure of riding a lift whilst aliens hem you in from all sides. Then before you know it, it’s a stage where robots are pouring out of the floor, there’s lasers everywhere, flames, bullets, pick ups and there’s a stage where the room is built around you and then and then and then.
It’s like the team responsible wanted to cram every idea they had for games into one game. It’s astounding. More so when you realise how normal this sort of thing used to be, how arcade games at home would let themselves spiral outwards rather than just retain a really narrow focus, done well. I didn’t even realise how much I missed that but I do. I really do. It makes me feel spoilt, ruined, like you can’t possibly be giving me all this? Seriously, you are? Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Oh, there’s local co-op too because of course there is. Why leave any stone unturned?
It’d all be for nothing if it didn’t play so well, obviously. Which it does! It plays wonderfully, always pushing you into the swarms of killer drones rather than running backwards, rather than the circling of Geometry Wars. Wade in, knee deep in roboguts, needing to grab batteries to make it to the end of a stage alive. It takes no time to find the rhythm the game wants you to fall into, alternating between primary and secondary weapons, rushing for power ups, aiming for that ever enticing higher score.
Gosh. I love Assault Android Cactus so much, you know? There’s few games I’d use the term masterpiece for but in this case, Team Witch Beam have worked for it and earned it. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s the right and proper good stuff. It’s an arcade game, a not Dreamcast really but totally Dreamcast videogame that the best part of five years on still excites me.
Which, let’s face it that’s what you want from an arcade game. Okay, okay, it’s what I want anyway. I genuinely couldn’t ask for more. Well, except maybe for some fish but that’s just me. Maybe the next one, eh?
You are reading Rob’s Punching Robots Club
The online home of Rob Fearon, disabled videogame maker, games journalist, crap film watcher, gobshite and doodler. Rob’s been around games a very, very long time now and Punching Robots Club is their personal blog featuring whatever nonsense takes their fancy.
Sometimes it’s a sketch, a review, an article about videogames, a pointer to something Rob finds cool. Whatever, really. Expect anything, Rob’s tired of being a brand online and so it’s just stuff and things these days. Nice stuff and things, mind you.
