Promethium

Whoa. Nice indie shooter. The operative word here is succinct. The vertical and horizontal bounds of the play-field are limited and your ship is able to traverse both left and right. The background is the Promethium armada ships in which your objective is to blow up each ships shield generator. The operative component, of course not explained anywhere, is the pick-ups dropped on enemy kill, essentially currency and there lies the depth. There are a string of power-ups lining the bottom of the play field. For every pick-up the string advances one and hence you can choose to make a real-time purchase of the highlighted power-up. Some power-ups are one use, though some like the first icon speed have multiple levels. The buy button on the Xbox controller was A and you can use an invariable number of buttons to shoot. Enemy patterns at least through the first few levels are somewhat if not totally static though I didn't find this to be an issue. The rest of the package has a surprising polish, adorned by cell shaded graphics and good ambient sound, music and effects. The developers mention their inspiration, classic Commodore 64 arcade games and [url=https://steamcommunit…

Uridium has never been so much tedium.

Bought this hoping for a modern take on Uridium. Unfortunately this isn't it. - Glitchy - moving to the top or bottom of the screen whilst holding UP or DOWN respectively causing the screen to stop scrolling until you release the movement direction. - Controls - default controls are terrible layout compared to other scrollers (have to fire with analog triggers ratehr than digital buttons, which interfers with ROF), with no ability to remap - Gameplay encourages slow movement, whereas Uridium was all about moving at high speed across a dreadnought that was littered with barriers to crash into, and mine generators to keep you dodging.

This could have been a fun Uridium inspired side-scrolling shooter... if it worked. The game looks great with its cel-shaded visuals and adds a novel twist to the game it's based on adding a Gradius style power-up system. But as soon as you start to play, it all falls apart. The game stutters along and looks nothing like the smooth arcade shooter showcased in the video. It moves along as if you're plodding through mud rather than flying through space, lunging forward in steps rather than smoothly and rapidly. I'd certainly expect better, especially as my PC not only meets but more than exceeds the recommended specs to run this (Ryzen 9 processor, 32Gb of RAM and a 16Gb Radeon RTX 3080 GPU). ** UPDATE ** After spending some time tweaking the settings, I've had to drop the resolution to 1920x1080 to get this to be playable but it's still nothing close to the speed and smooth visuals shown in the video so it's definitely misleading. It's okay but unfair at times when there's far too much on screen giving you no space to move at all. I do wonder what specs this was tested on, or if the developers expected people to play it at relatively low resolutions.

This game is super hard, super enjoyable and super cheap, so what's not to love? It's one of those games where you always want to have one more go, just to see if you can make it further. In my case, I usually can't. (Did I mention it's hard?) The developer is a lovely guy too, who certainly knows how to make a hard, retro style game. Maybe I'll be able to beat it one day... PS: Did I mention how hard it is?

Best 2 quid I've ever spent.