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Pros
Pro Charming sound design
The sound effects in the game are weird choices, but they do have a certain charm to them. The "prepare for battle" voice clip at the start sounds silly but it's similarly charming. There's a certain charm to the sounds as a result of all that.
Pro Sprites are okay for 1992
Admittedly the sprite work, for a game supposedly mostly made by one person, wasn't half bad for a 1992 game. I'm not a fan of the backgrounds but the sprites themselves are fine.
Cons
Con Atrocious level design
Episode 2 and 3's levels are all but copy-pasted from each other, and both more or less spam one specific enemy type (said enemy type is horribly designed in of itself mind you) a lot after a certain point in the name of making things harder. Episode 1 isn't much better, but is, in fairness, less bad by virtue of not spamming that one enemy type. It does however still repeat the same enemy over and over again and call it a level far too often.
Con Framerate is terrible
The game runs at about 12FPS, which is a problem for a twitch action game about reacting to things fast. You can't react nearly fast enough if you can't see anything until a tenth of a second later, in a game that seemingly expects you to react to stuff faster than that.
Additionally, somehow, it pulls off the bizarre feat of managing to lag sometimes despite an already low framerate.
Con You can take unavoidable damage at random
There is an enemy type, that shows up increasingly more and more throughout the game, where what it does is the following:
- Teleport when off-screen.
- Shoot at any time with a beam that hits the entire height of the screen instnatly, including while off-screen.
- Quickly dive-bomb the player from wherever it is.
Thanks to point 2, the enemy can hit you unavoidably with nothing you can do. This can render levels unwinnable entirely through chance in a game that is supposed to be a twitch reflex action game.
Con Game steals backgrounds from other sources
There is a background that was blatantly stolen from Star Trek. There is a good chance it is not the only one, as I somehow doubt the game's solo dev had the hardware needed for all the pre-rendered CGI backgrounds throughout the game.
Con Game is unstable
The game crashes fairly often, especially in the second and third episodes. When it doesn't crash, it sometimes breaks in other severe, show-stopping ways, such as the UI completely glitching out and becoming unreadable as a result.