Amaranthine

Amaranthine is yet another of literally hundreds of lazy amateur 2D retro top-down shooter/brawlers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. There's really nothing remarkable about this one... except perhaps to say just how unremarkable this is in a sea of mediocre games on the shovelware end of the Steam store. How to explain this? You control a crappy pixelblob spaceship, and you shoot other pixelblobs, just like the games of old, except, worse, because this isn't as good as those, which are now free, and of course, they want your money for this one. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a resul…

Against all odds this game is good! I have owned it and unfairly disliked it for YEARS since I didn't realize it was a mouse controlled shooter and I was really into playing on my arcade stick at the time (still am really), but anyways...my stick is broken right now and I like playing things via the "proper" means of control thus figured I'd give this a shot since I was on KB & M. It is a shockingly simple but effective gameplay loop, the game actually undersells itself by simply calling it a "shooter with procedural elements". While the "levels" which are essentially just variations on the same backdrop so far, are incredibly simple and lack no real geometry. Just waves of enemies in the most euro shmup way humanly possible, but the game throws quite a lot at you and while the patterns aren't carefully crafted to my eye, they are reasonably dense which combined with the responsive mouse controls, provides an interesting challenge. On top of that, the game gives you currency and throws weapons unlocks at you left and right, along with allowing you to equip up to 3 different weapons and upgrade your shields, the steam page lists NONE of this to my knowledge surprisingly. Decent litt…

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Great shooter game, good music

I played this for 5 minutes and was ready to refund it... until I realized I bought it over a month ago. So I grieved the tragic loss of the dollar I spent, and decided to try force myself to play it and have fun. And I'm glad I did, because it delievered what I wanted from a SHMUP: interesting moment-to-moment gameplay. Every enemy type is easy to recognize and serves a unique function, and they're composed in a way that forces you to constantly assess and prioritize what to shoot (or ignore), and how you should optimally position yourself. It's also reasonably challenging and death will come quickly for you if you play carelessly and are inattentive to what's on the screen. However, the loot and weapon system - which supposedly makes this game unique - does nothing for me because it all boils down to mindlessly min-maxing. And the only real viable weapon composition is to attach 2 fast-firing weapons to quickly take out the weak enemies, and to attach a slow-firing piercing weapon for long strings of enemies. And as long as you do this, any weapon is interchangeable for any other because they all create a horizontal strip of death in front of your ship that you simply have to …

fUN gAME.. Best played with a mouse . Challenging , especially the Elite level where you can try to get high scores on the Global Leaderboards. Tough Game .. Fast Reaction speed is required .