Разработчик: Vector Hat
Описание
The Story
A malfunction with your experimental R-COIL engine has torn a hole in reality and you have fallen through it. You find yourself under attack by a horde of unfamiliar and hostile creatures. Your main thruster and weapons systems have been fused and your stabilizer is offline; you cannot fire your weapons without moving. Will you find your way home, or will you die trying?The Game
R-COIL is an old-fashioned multi-directional shooter with a unique single button control scheme. Use the stick to aim and a single button to fire and thrust. Tap to fire. Hold to thrust. Each time you fire your bullet will push you back a little. You’ll have to balance shooting and thrusting to maintain control. Once you master it you’ll be cruising through the cosmos like a space boss in no time. Just try not to get yourself killed.Easy right? Wrong! This is not the friendly part of space and whatever you run into isn’t going to be happy to see you. There are shielded sharpshooting saucers, bullet spewing spinners, laser towers, and kamikaze buzz-saws to name a few. In fact, if it’s not a rock, you’re probably going to have to try to kill it before it kills you.
Features:
- Single Player, Local Co-op, & Local Duel Modes.
- Stress Free Mode - Relax and shoot. No lives. No pressure.
- Countless Enemies and even more Power-ups.
- Music and sound by the utterly unfamous Rainbow Kitten.
Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7 and Up
- Processor: Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz
- Memory: 512 MB RAM
- Graphics: 256 MB Graphics Memory and Directx 9.0c Compatible gpu
- DirectX: Version 9.0
- Storage: 100 MB available space
- Sound Card: Onboard sound card
- Additional Notes: Gamepad or Mouse Required
Mac
- OS: Mac OS X: 10.7, 10.8, 10.9
- Processor: Dual Core Processor
- Memory: 512 MB RAM
- Graphics: 256 MB Graphics Memory
- Storage: 100 MB available space
- Sound Card: Onboard sound card
- Additional Notes: Gamepad or Mouse Required
Linux
- OS: Ubuntu 10.04 (and newer)
- Processor: Dual Core Processor
- Memory: 512 MB RAM
- Graphics: 256 MB Graphics Memory
- Storage: 100 MB available space
- Sound Card: Onboard sound card
- Additional Notes: Gamepad or Mouse Required
Отзывы пользователей
R-COIL is both deceptively simple and vexingly fun. When your firing system gets its wires crossed with your thrusters, you're in for a bumpy ride! Have I mentioned wave after wave of alien ships, all intent on your destruction?
I needed a game that I could play quickly, and I found this retro arcade homage to Asteroids on a Steam sale. I've definitely been loving it!
Pros
* This game is hard - probably difficult enough to keep interest for those who like a challenge.
* "No stress" mode with infinite lives, if that floats your boat.
* Fun retro graphics and sounds.
* Just what I wanted for a 10 minute shmup session.
Cons
* This game is hard - maybe not the best for those easily frustrated.
* "Stress free" mode doesn't clear the screen of enemies when you re-spawn, so you can be repeatedly killed by the same evil ships. Keep firing, you can (eventually) get past it.
* The thinnest of plots - but that's not the point anyway.
There are Steam leader boards for regular mode. I'm currently #16 in the world, which at my age and playing with a mouse instead of a controller means that there aren't nearly enough people who know about R-COIL.
In March this year (2020) some developers at Itchio including Vector Hat offered their games for free to help gamers get through the Corona lockdown and I downloaded a bunch of them, mostly shmups. R-COIL was the first game I tried since I recently played another Asteroids game and had seen the title before. To compete with others I later bought the game at Steam.
R-Coil is a simple little Asteroids inspired game with vector graphics and a retro style view. It looks fine and some of the later weapons have some really nice visual effects.
A game like this is all about gameplay and it offers something unique. You only have one button to shoot and to fly. When you shoot there's massive recoil, hence the name. At first the control will feel awkward and maybe even wrong. However if you give it enough time you'll learn how to control the ship. Once you've mastered flying the ship and its weapons it becomes a real joy. You can use a controller or a mouse. When using a mouse moving left/right rotates the ship. This would make it possible to use an arcade spinner controller as well but you would need to assign a left mouse button to one of the buttons.
There are 6 levels each consisting of multiple waves with increasing difficulty. Every few waves there's a checkpoint. The waves are procedurally generated with some being partially scripted e.g. the first wave is always the same 3-5 yellow saucers coming from the left but the position they sprout from differs. With most waves you don't know which enemy or enemies you'll get and where they'll sprout from. So you always have to be battle ready.
There are ship/weapon upgrades that will appear as text on the screen moving from one side to the other you can pick up by flying through it. You'll have to learn the abbreviations because only some of them are beneficial in the situation you'll find yourself in. Once shot the text will slow down. When you don't want a certain upgrade you can shoot the text a few times and often a new one will appear.
If you just want to play through the game there's a stress free mode that will let you continue when your ship is destroyed. This mode is super easy until you get spawn continuously in the middle of some bug enemies. It takes some patience to get through that part. Personally I think it would have been more fun to have a mode where you can respawn at your last checkpoint indefinitely. That would allow you to practice tough waves and completing the game would still be a fair challenge.
There are two multiplayer modes, coop and duel which support a local game and Steam's remote play together. Duel can be played with bots as well.
Here's a game I recorded:
https://youtu.be/p8b2cwilTk4
I've played a lot of Asteroids clones, none of them as bad as this.
This is an interesting little space shooter which I bought on a sale.
Good stuff:
First of all let's get to the best part: The visuals are the best old school vector gaming visuals I've seen yet. There's a variety of effects and shaders on top of everything and visually this game is seriously polished. Even the menus and text appear in a really polished and awesome way. Very very solid work on the visuals.
Effects wise I apreciated the fact that I can turn effects on/off one by one. The game even starts with a big splashscreen warning of this and asking if you want effects to be on overall. The 1 by 1 aspect is great though since I loved all effects except one (screen jitter), which made me a bit nauseous in the menus. I just turned that one off and could enjoy all the others merrily.
The same with the sound, it's very fitting and very retro and enjoyable.
Gameplay wise it's an interesting asteroids type game with a large variety of all sorts of different enemies. I am definitely enjoying the gameplay variety here.
The inclusion of a stress free option for easier play and "just experiencing the game" is also a great add on.
The main movement differentiation mechanic from other such shooters is that your fire button and thrust button are the same. Hold for thrust, tap for fire. Also there is quite a large amount of recoil. I see a few reviews saying they don't like this, but I think it's a well done mechanic. Basically you can never fly forward and shoot at the same time. The movement scheme which is created from this adds a lot of complexity and challenge.
Less Good stuff:
Directional controls are a bit fiddly. I first tried playing with a mouse and realized you definitely have to dial mouse sensitivity way down for it to work well. Once I did it was an okay control scheme, but a bit confusing at times since it's "move mouse left and the ship rotates a few degrees to the left of it's nose". Which means if the ship is upside down your brain can take a bit parse it properly. I think this can be learned properly in a longer game though.
I wasn't completely at ease with the gamepad directional controls either. I'm not sure if my gamepad is incompatible, but it seemed like sometimes moving the stick left faces the ship to cardinal left, sometimes it rotates left. After getting used to it a bit I could play with not much worries though. But I'm still a bit confused at the controls.
So overall my constructive criticism would be absolutely everything else is awesome, but I'd love more control options. Maybe a "move mouse left to face cardinal screen left" type of control scheme. Maybe a keyboard WASD type control scheme etc. With more controls this would be a completely ace game.
Out of the control options already supplied I preferred mouse with very low sensitivity. That's how I got farthest in the game.
Overall:
Extremely stylish retro shooter game with seemingly quite varied gameplay. Some control difficulties which I'd hope for an update for the game on, but nothing insurmountable. Would be well worth the price I payed for it the visual style alone.
Hard but in a good classic arcade sorta way.
Great retro-inspired game play!
A great throwback to old-school vector games with some clever twists on classic gameplay.
Gamepad is pretty much required; other than that, this is so much fun.
This game isnt what I expected, but it may be suitable for someone else
I purchased the game and got 6 friends loaded onto the map and the controllers worked really well
To me the game play and graphics are too busy for the multiplayer experience I was expecting, especially for new players
1. Gameplay, the whole point of the game is single button, I understand that,
however with multiple players who have never played before, the controls were not that intuitive - moving around with 1 button instead of traditional controls - which meant there was not really any element of skill, it was just who could fire the most.
2. Graphics, Im not sure if its by design, but the game had huge flashing colours covering the map, which was both disorienting and confusing.
I would be interested in trying out the game if there was possibly an addition of accelerator added (the joysticks already work for turning) because the 8 player addition is something that most other games dont have and was interested in this game initially for
I had to pick this up, as I was a huge fan of the original arcade cabinet. At the time (around 1980) I was also a member of the 100000 club.
The big hype around the machine when it rolled into our local arcade was the graphics. It used the exact same vector screen that Asteroids used, but it came with an additional tech called PRISM (Photon Refractive Index Signal Modulation) to give it the vivid color scheme. This was basically a layer of sliding sheets on top of the vector display that featured small line grids, similar to how Polaroid glasses work. The color was great, but the extra layers of glass had the downside that it produced the blur effect that this adaptation manages to recreate so well.
Another downside was the cost of the PRISM display. Only 150 of these cabinets were manufactured as a result, and they are near impossible to track down these days.
This is a very faithful adaptation of the original and I'd say it's a bit easier to play with a gamepad. The cabinet used a 2-1/4 inch trackball - not easy to aim with one of those!
Other improvements over the original is the ability to customise your ship and the co-op expanded from 2 to 8 players. The high score chart allows for longer names too, which is a nice improvement of the 3 character limit of the original. Oh, and some additional new game modes.
Anyhoo, good memories and I'm determined to get back into the 100000s.
Really clever neo-arcade game. It's an arena shmup with momentum-based movement like Asteroids, but with the added twist that shooting and thrust are mapped to the same button: hold the button to thrust forward, and tap the button to shoot (which also has recoil, giving you a bit of backwards momentum). You've got to find a ballance between thrusting and shooting. As the game progresses, there are some nice enemy designs and some really cool powerups to keep things interesting (and colorful).
By now you know about R-COIL's gimmick: It's a very hard Asteroids clone where firing and thrust is the same button. Only it's not really Asteroids, and it's not the Dark Souls of Asteroids either.
First off, the asteroids hardly matter. They increase your score a little, but more often than not you're happy that they're there so you can hide behind them. Secondly luck is too much of a factor here for this to be Dark Astersouls.
One thing that's hard to achieve is precision, and that makes some enemies a lot more annoying than others. Snaking between two shots in a 20-shot arc of fire can be hard even in scrolling shoot 'em ups where you have precise control over your X and Y position, but here it sometimes simply comes down to luck. Did you fire one more shot than planned, shifting your trajectory a bit too much? Or is your shield rotated with the opening right into incoming fire? Tough luck.
Luck is also a component with the powerups. In some scenes you'd really love to have a spread shot or laser to take out the half dozen bee-like green things that circle you and shoot from all angles, but all you have is your basic pew-pew gun and those bastards are extremely hard to hit with that. Due to the randomness of the upgrades it sometimes feels unfair to lose a life when you're almost through the level and simply didn't stumble upon the right powerup in time. The level 2 boss that sports a "castle" upgrade (a ring of shields circling around him) is very easy to take out with a spread shot, but a huge risk with your pea shooter.
The levels themselves at least repeat the same patterns, so there is some sequence for you to learn so you can make the best out of the powerups you have.
The excellent news is that games are short overall. Unlike long-winded roguelikes, it feels like you can be through the entire game in under 10 minutes. After that it becomes a high-score chaser, and that's where a game like this is right at home.
That being said, I'm so far only up to level 3, and certainly nowhere near the 10 minute mark per game. Level 3 is a cursed pandemonium of screaming death that should be illegal under some sort of cruelty law. No one has completed it yet, more than a month after release, so get cracking and try.
If you can deal with the fact that luck and randomness plays a bigger part here than might be obvious from the screenshots, and if you always wanted to know what it feels like to play your Vectrex while on LSD, this is the right game for you. I couldn't test the co-op or duel features (no friends, see), but I imagine they could be a good fit to the already chaotic nature of the game.
I have just one technical niggle. Even with a good analog controller like a DS4 or Xbox One model, I feel like the ship's rotation could be a bit more precise. Sometimes I'd like to fire a bullet at just such an angle, but the controller seems too coarse to rotate to that spot. That makes some of the smaller enemies (e.g. the green ball that tries to orbit you) too hard to hit. But maybe today's controllers don't have such a high resolution and it just can't be done.
This game is very hard, but really beautiful. You should play it.
LOOKS 10/10
This game is beautiful.
SOUND 10/10
It has all the lazer goodness that you would need if you are nostalgic for asteroids or any space arcade shooters. The audio is something I really appreciate as well. There is a great sense of "chill" in the background music.
GAMEPLAY 8/10
It's the "Dark Souls" of space shooters-- at least for me.
This game is one of the most difficult space shooters I have ever played. It is unapologetically hard, and unless you are playing on stress-free mode, prepare to have you ass handed to you. I found that mashing the fire button and moving frantically was the most effective way to stay alive. Fun-- but hard.
One problem that I would note is probably a bug, is that if you die near the center of the game, and there are ships that are "attracted do you"-- like heat-seeking missiles. When you re-spawn, you are immediately killed with no chance of escaping the feedback loop of death. I watched helplessly as my player was killed off multiple times. So just be aware that if you die in the middle, and there are ships "searching for you" try to boost out of those traps quickly or at least avoid the center as often as possible when facing enemies of this type.
MULTIPLAYER --?/10
There are co-op modes, but there isn't anyone on there, so I was left to play solo.
OVERALL 9/10
It's what I would call a "prefectly contained gem of a game".
If you thirst for space shooters with creative powerups, smooth mechanics, quality graphics and a difficulty level that harkens back to older games of yore-- buy this game.
A pretty fun game, with a hard-to-master mechanic for a shoot-em-up. Your shoot and movement are tied to the same action and, more importantly, your shoots have recoil.
This game is very simple, but there's a lot of content too:
- The arcade difficulty is too high? Play through the game in the stress-free mode!
- Have friends to play with? Try the co-op mode!
- Got bored of jolly cooperation? Try the duel mode!
There are a lot of "power-ups" that show up during gameplay too. It makes the whole shooting and moving all the more strategic, in my opinion. The orbiters are kind of overpowered, though (not that I mind, this game gets tough fast)
If you're feeling the nostalgia for arcade style shoot-em-ups, you should try this game.
Super fun, very challenging twist on the "Asteroids" concept. The game has a large variety of enemies to keep you on your toes, but there are neatly designed, meaningful power-ups to collect to help you out.
The sound and visual design are absolutely superb, which doesn't come across in screen shots, or even in videos. When you have it playing in front of you and you are interacting with it, it's like being transported into an 80s arcade. But how you fondly remember it, not how it actually was.
The game is also a fascinating example of accessible design. Although it is recommended to be played with a controller, you can play one-handed with a mouse. I actually played on a trackpad on my Mac. I also have the highest score in the game right now, so come at me bro etc. etc.
You also have a "Stress Free" mode, which gives you infinite lives (at the expense of not being able to register a score on the leaderboard). Multiple visual options are available for those with vision issues, or if you find the visual effects distracting.
There is an arcade style single player mode alongside competitive couch multiplayer, which is way more than you would expect for a game this price. Both modes play and feel very differently, making this a cool package.
Great game. Tough. Accessible. Tight design. Heavily recommended.
I bought this game because it looked like a modern Comet Busters and is available to play with my Steam Controller on my SteamOS Steam Machine and can do 4 player co-op.
I the style of the game is pretty awesome, vector based objects and hitting those core mechanics right. I am new to the knockback on fire mechanic but I can see how it could be really fun with more people, I think I just suck at it.
Some of the text on first boot is obnoxious but it seems to go away after first run.
It was very difficult to figure out how to play on keyboard, I feel like the controls and menus could be improved to get out of my way a little more.
Overall I would mark this a 4 out of 5 with some room for improvement in the menu and controls. It certainly fills a niche and takes a seat in my library as a cool core game I can chill out and play with friends on mr 4 controllers.
Absolutely reccomend to people who like this genre.
A fun Asteroids clone where the game's 1 button control is both its unique aspect and the maddening challenge that sets it apart from the others.
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Vector Hat |
| Платформы | Windows, Mac, Linux |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 25.01.2025 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 94% положительных (17) |