Red Death

3/10

A fun shoot'em / bullet hell game up. The colors seem a bit aggressive at first, but you quickly get used to it. It is hard, fast and punishing. Perfect for some quick action and frustration-screaming.

Already quite an improvement over the first [b]Project Starship[/b] (released less than a year earlier), it has no roguelite elements. The story is very simple but the atmosphere is more serious and grim, with the pilot being related to one of the original characters, apparently it runs in the family to fight eldritch gods on starships. There is still a button to cause a slowdown but it's nowhere as marked as in [b]PS[/b]. Collecting bonuses allows to fill up a meter to unleash an Overload, temporarily getting the full power of the weapons. As it can be noticed in the screenshots, the graphics have a simple yet incredibly stark style, based on the use of a few colors; most of the time I think there's no more than four on screen. It's a very short game - it can be finished in 15 minutes - but equally difficult, one of those true bullet hells with projectiles filling up the screen, for skilled [i]danmaku[/i] enjoyers who will surely like a quick fix for such a ridiculous price.

fun

Red Death is a solid budget bullet hell that punches above its weight for the $1 price tag — the four-color retro aesthetic is charming, the boss patterns are genuinely creative, and the focus/overdrive mechanics give it some depth. That said, the weapon balance is noticeably skewed toward the laser, and losing all your powerups on a single hit can turn boss fights into a frustrating slog with the pea shooter. The unskippable dialogue and that baffling stretch of doing nothing before the final boss really kill the momentum. It's not going to replace your favorite shmup, but if you're a fan of the genre and want something quick and cheap, you'll probably get your money's worth.

Almost unplayable for me