Geometry Wars – Punching Robots Club

Whilst the high bar for Asteroids reinventions remains a tie between Spheres Of Chaos (I prefer the older version over 2012’s rejig but YMMV, they’re both available for free now) and Echoes (Again. I prefer + to 3 but honestly. It’s so close in quality as to be unimportant), Debris Infinity (available on Steam too) is certainly worth a mention also.

After being mildly disappointed by the recent Asteroids Recharged (it’s not a bad game but it did very little to excite me, I wouldn’t not recommend it but I’d not enthuse over it in a hurry either) I’ve been on the look out for a fresh & decent new arcade take on Asteroids and stumbled onto Debris Infinity pretty much by accident whilst rummaging for something else I’d forgotten the name of.

It’s a game that fuses, surprisingly successfully, Echoes style arena based asteroid shooting and familiar Geometry Wars enemy wave patterns across a handful of modes. So twin stick asteroids with bolt ons, essentially. I doubt anyone going into this, even having not played either of the games it borrows from, would find many surprises here.

It’s definitely scrappy! The art is a bit all over the shop both in style and in coherence, the asteroids and smaller enemies are great, it’s sort of just the rest of it that doesn’t always come together.

Which is fine, you know? I’m not complaining so much as just stating something rather obvious. I can’t say it bothered me even for a moment because I was far too busy trying not to crash my spaceship into things but it does mean it doesn’t present quite so well in a single screenshot.

So, it all kind of adds up to a game I enjoyed a lot but also, don’t really have all that much to talk about with it. It’s a good, solid, enjoyable Asteroids variant where everything glows really nicely and has enough flashing lights to keep me quiet.

I’ve been dipping in and out of it on the Switch but the game’s available most other places, except for PlayStation for whatever reason. Definitely worth a punt.

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A screenshot from the arena shooter Tachyon Project. It is a top down view game. There are lots of yellow enemies blitzing towards the player's blue spacecraft.

If you ever needed (more) proof that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing at the best of times, I bought Tachyon Project at release in 2015, mentally filed it under “not very good” for some reason long lost to the mists of time and never returned to it.

This was quite clearly a mistake because Tachyon Project is pretty far from not very good and it’s been a game I keep coming back to these past few months and enjoying myself with it immensely.

I mean, I know I have a habit of being wrong sometimes but this seemed awfully self defeatingly wrong given how much enjoyment I’ve clearly been denying myself.

Oh well, it’s done now. No real harm done.

A screenshot from Tachyon Project. A bunch of purple enemies close in on the player, hovering over a glowing blue hex grid.

It’s probably obvious from the screenshots but Tachyon Project is a dual stick arena shooter in a similar vein to Geometry Wars. I doubt any genre fans will find anything especially surprising in here – it’s all rather familiar in its own little way but that’s fine, right? Perfectly fine. We don’t have to reinvent everything with every new game. Sometimes “more, a bit like that other thing” is *exactly* what I want from a game.

Not that Tachyon Project doesn’t do enough to stand alone, it certainly does – it plays around with its own selection of glowing enemies, modes and what have you. Just the smaller arena alone is enough to give the game a different enough vibe.

It’s unquestionably its own game, doing its own thing, just in an awfully familiar space.

A screenshot from the game Tachyon Project. The player fires at a giant, glowing, cylindrical enemy.

Probably the biggest gulf between Tachyon Project and Geometry Wars comes courtesy of the difficulty. Whereas Geometry Wars can be remarkably punishing in all its incarnations, Tachyon Project is much, much, much, much more gentle. If I had to describe it in a word, that word would be “softer”. If I had to describe it in a sound, that sound would be “pew”. It’s a softer pew (try sneaking that one past autocorrect).

So yeah, it’s usually a little over a fiver and a really enjoyable blast. Still no idea why I put it down first time round though.

With your host, Rob Remakes

Tag: Geometry Wars

Cataloguing The New Arcade: Debris Infinity

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Tachyon Project

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