SpaceMerc

SpaceMerc is an awesome fast-paced Shoot'em up, action and Bullet Hell game! It has various spaceships and missions, which upgrade gradually. It also has 45 "easy to do" achievements. The soundtracks are so cool and the gameplay is really enjoyable. 7/10

first impressions: good. kinda "basic", still, enjoyable. dev seems to love his work. i'll give this a full "try", i guess :D

SpaceMerc is a 2D retro pixel vertical scrolling shoot 'em up/bullet hell/Galaga ripoff slapped together with GameMaker Studio (ugh) and dropped onto Steam unceremoniously. There's a story mode tacked on that doesn't add anything to the lacklustre experience. On the upside this isn't any kind of asset flip and seems to have been genuinely and sincerely made, just, well, badly. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The artwork here is terrible, it's a blend of old retro pixel "art" used as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics, and some of the most amateurish MS-Paint style drawings (I won't deign to call these "illustrations"). It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can do graphics properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result of these decisions. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic low quality art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, …

It's a pretty unique shmup, with a novel, but worthwhile approach to difficulty and difficulty curves. Instead of just having the patterns start out trivial and get complicated, the damage scales over time to make it so you can practice early on on still tricky patterns that are just more forgiving about a few mistakes. The weapon purchasing system is absolutely top-notch, with an excellent approach to pricing and variety seldom matched elsewhere. There are many kinds of weapons to try, and if you're feeling daring you can try to balance two weapons' weaknesses against each other. The dialogue and store descriptions contain many clever ideas, although they're not always presented very well. Bosses and minions have interesting shot patterns, but while the levels are diverse and well-paced, and surely designed with care, minions often seem to be placed a bit haphazardly, making the patterns of enemy appearances a bit hard to predict or memorize.