Pixel Star

[h1] Another arcade shooter similar to Asteroids. Fly in space, fight enemies and occasionally stumble across boss battle. Not very original and visuals leave much to be desired. Safely skip this one it doesn't introduce anything new. [/h1]

Good top down shooter in space! +++ Pros +++ + Rogue-Like approach with randomized pickup upgrades each run + You can get ridiculously overpowered with enough upgrades. In fact, it's a bit like Vampire Survivors. + Several weapons, secondary weapons and abilities to choose your loadout + Difficulty options + Hunting for all achievements is fun + One run takes only 10 minutes and then you can go on to chase your highscore. Surviving 20 minutes is pretty hard to do. --- Cons --- - Only 4 bosses - Those damn laser sattelites hit you from off screen without any warning sign and kill you in 0.2 seconds. They ended most of my runs. There is nothing I see you can do against them, but getting lucky. - No unlockables. All weapons, secondaries, abilities and difficulties are all unlocked from the start. - Stupid [i]die 100 times[/i] achievement. I died 17 times when I had achieved every other achievement and dying on purpose takes 20 seconds.

Pixel Star is basically the classic game Asteroids if everything was cranked to 11. It's... not bad, I'm not going to say I didn't have fun marking off a winning run in 45 minutes of play, but part of the "cranked to 11" is that you often take hits from nearly-invisible things due to the amount of strobe effects and screenshake, or from things that fly onto the screen too fast to be reacted to even if the screen was empty, so it kind of ends up like a preview of the Magic Survival / Vampire Survivors formula from several years later where shooting is important but your stat/pickup grind is moreso. However, I don't particularly think it makes for either a great Asteroids-like game (I'd point to something like Beat Hazard instead) or a great Survivors game (where I'd point to something like HoloCure), so ultimately this is not going to be recommended. It is one of those non-recommendations where I'd recommend trying it out and marking a win quickly if you do own it, though. It should take you under an hour, after all!

An improvement to the Asteroids formula, well-worth your time.

blah fairly drab. COntrols are a bit wonky.

its fun