Разработчик: Flying Fire, LLC
Описание
NEW Item Randomizer:
- Available on Steam's Beta Branch [itemrandomizer]
- Play through the Metroidvania section of the game with randomized item locations
- Item locations are determined by the seed that you enter when starting the game so you can play the same randomization multiple times
Key Features:
- Classic 2D platforming
- 10+ challenging boss fights
- Designed for speedrunning and sequence breaking
- No RNG
- Original soundtrack
- 4 Colors
- Password system
- 3 different endings depending on in game actions
Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7
- Processor: 1.2 Ghz or superior
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: 2 GB RAM
- Storage: 500 MB available space
Отзывы пользователей
This one was a pretty rough gameboy game.
كلا
This game is pretty fun! It's not huge, but there's still quite a lot to explore. After the first few linear levels (which apparently you *can* sequence break out of; there's an achievement for that, which I did not get so I don't know how to do it), it actually becomes a normal MV, with ability upgrades that let you explore new areas, etc. The danger level is such that you actually have to be careful with combat; you can't just rush in and tank, which is what I normally do. This means that, as you play, you do actually get better at the game. There's no randomness, which means that you can learn enemy placements and their triggers to eventually beat something that keeps defeating you. That said, the game *is* hard, and I haven't actually beaten it yet. I'm not sure if I'm good enough, to be honest. But I'll keep trying for at least a while!
Now, DSA is not all roses and sunshine. The first problem is the lack of saving. I mean, seriously, no saving? There's a password system, where you need to copy a grid of 64 bits. It's cute, but it's a huge pain, and it didn't need to be. It could, for example, do a base-64 encoding, which would take 11 basic ASCII characters instead of making me draw a frickin' grid. Still 64 bits. Or 16 hex digits. Or... let me actually save? That's retro for retro's sake, in my opinion. The retro-ness of the rest of the game is generally fine, but one particular annoyance is the finicky controls for some of the upgrades. A *slightly* more modern game would have assigned them to a button instead of making me hit back-forward-jump, which results in a move in the wrong direction about as often as in the right direction, making it kind of useless for its intended purpose. That said, I don't think this is worth not playing the game.
One final note about the graphics: I think they're kind of awful? I mean, you can see them for yourself in the trailer. But they really don't get in the way of enjoying the game, and that's very much to the game's credit.
Overall, I'm glad I'm playing this. It's pretty neat! It's a bit different from Hollow Knight (despite coming out in the same year), but that's OK! It's not fodder for years-long obsession (though... I don't know you and I don't know your life), but I'm definitely better off having played it.
Bought and played it on the strength of video on The Metroidvania Review. The map and exploration are solid MV fare, but christ is the combat infuriating.
There's a jump cancel window at the beginning of attack. But it is miniscule and gets you hit so often in projectile wars, and be warned there will be a lot of enemies spawning out of the ether to chuck plasma at you.
Missing this jump window results in the MC just standing there with a decent amount of recovery after throwing the fireball.
The backwards damage boosts when trying to run through rooms gets absurd towards the end of the game and it's because there's no value in fighting regular enemies, it's best to charge through areas before too many flying turrets spawn in and start bombarding the screen with orbs. The orbs won't stop. Enemies can shoot at you from out of the frame but your fireballs won't connect if the enemy is out of the frame. I kept intentionally dying on the Air Dash pick up screen if I couldn't get to it immediately because the game would suddenly become Danmaku Unlimited.
Flying turrets can fly out of the room's exit and shoot you just *AS* you transition and knock you back into the room.
There's a SUPER trolly section where you go through a long series of empty rooms and hit a checkpoint just before picking up the rocket fuel/can and have to endure a massive gauntlet of goons on the way back, where ironically it would have been beneficial to have avoided the checkpoint and take a death right after the pickup for fast travel. This is the sort of shit that made me toss Cathedral.
Speaking of which, I started intentionally dying once I realised my pick-ups are saved and will persist when you respawn at a checkpoint, because the backtrack will inevitably be that groan-inducing. The Air Dash Pick-up room? Best believe I took every possible shot to the head upon picking it up.
One of the bosses does 3HP in contact damage and it's primary form of attack (Surprise: It's fireballs again) does 2HP.
The final boss was unsatisfying since it derps out and keeps jumping up against the walls repeatedly without attacking allowing you to freely wail on him for about 25%-50% of his life until he remembers what he's meant to be doing. Then when he stands by the wall you can't see the tells for his attack since the arm behind his head is hidden behind the wall tiles. His Air dash has a gigantic hit box (fine) which hits behind him (NO).
Well, I say final boss. I got on a rocket afterwards and seemed to be taken to a play that insinuated a Mega Man style boss rush arena. Nah, no thanks. Not every THERE'S MORE GAME THAN YOU EXPECTED reveal is a positive.
On top of that I got softlocked when going through a vertical transition and immediately falling back down, getting stuck on top of the frame and not being able to get back in. Fortunately that gave my a reason to use the password system and I'd been taking screenshot at every checkpoint, so ultimately I feel that's not much of an issue. But I do noticed that If you take a break on the final boss and want to return another day, you'll have to run through another large string of rooms to get back to him since the last checkpoint is before all that.
Like I say there's some good stuff here, but the meat of the experience has gotten me the most aggravated at a game in quite some time. People are saying "artificial difficulty" due to enemies being bullet sponges, but if you could more freely while slashing/shooting and there was some compromise between knockback/projectile aggro range it wouldn't be as maddening. I really liked the climactic boss of the linear levels FWIW.
Given its low price and relative obscurity, this can very much be called a hidden gem. While it's marred with various gameplay problems, mostly stemming from the developer's desire to emulate the classic titles of the past — such as the clunky controls that utilize way too few buttons, or the overcomplicated password system used for saving the game — it remains a charming little platformer that can provide some good entertainment over the course of 5-6 hours.
Horribly made game. Character moves too slow, attacks too slow, enemies flood the screen shooting at you from 4 directions and they take too many hits to kill with your slow movement and attack speed. Game sucks!
In 1993, there was an unlikely collaboration between Konami, Nintendo and Capcom to make a crossover between Castlevania and Metroid on the original Game Boy, a kind of sequel to both Dracula's Curse and Return of Samus. The game was co-developed between Keiji Inafune and Gunpei Yokoi, and was mostly finished before the relationship between the rival companies deteriorated and the code was buried deep in a dark archive.
In one of the greatest videogame discoveries of the century, game historian and developer Flying Fire somehow unearthed the code to this mythical crossover and released it, with some alterations, as Destroy Space Aliens for us all to enjoy. As the original three developers will have nothing to do with the game, nor even acknowledge its existence, the name of the protagonist had to be changed from Alucard to Sir Frank Jones VI, and the new breeds of Metroid (which in the original version arrived on earth in 1949 at the behest of Dracula) are referred to generically as "aliens". Kind of a shame, but nevermind.
What isn't a shame is the crunchy combat and timeless map design that could have only have been achieved by the masters of the genre in the Game Boy's golden years. It all holds up today, and it's frankly a crime that the innovations this game dreamt up were denied to the world in 1993, such as the perfect way it has levels that work both as linear action stages AND later as an interconnected Metroidvania world. Brilliant.
Now if Flying Fire could also find and release the rumoured Squaresoft-developed Marvel Comics SNES RPG written by George R R Martin I could die happy.
I just noticed that there aren't many reviews for this one, so I decided to give some love now. I didn't beat the game yet, then I'll give my impressions so far, and will update it when I do.
Good Things:
1 - There's a huge twist after some minutes (in my case around 1 hour and a half) of gameplay. The game starts as an old 2d platformer game. You have the first stage, which is the entrance of the castle. Then you get in and can choose between 4 other stages. After you beat these 4, there's a final short one, but the boss of this area is a bit harder than the others. When you beat him, you are awarded some sneakers that let you run faster, allowing you to reach a part you couldn't before and make you realize that you are on an interconnected map. You will soon discover that the other four stages were areas of this castle as well, and the game becomes a Metroidvania.
For me, this is one of the best things about this game. I don't remember any game with a twist like this and I really loved it.
2 - The graphics. I really loved each detail of the scenarios. The dev did an excellent job to make every scenario clearly distinct from the others, using a simple art style and few tones of green.
3 - The music is quite nice and nostalgic.
4 - I can't talk much about this part yet, because I didn't get to that part, but, I know that you can sequence break the first part of the game, this is advertised by the dev on this page and this is one of the achievements. I didn't try it yet because I want to finish the game before, but I'm excited to try that and I already know one way that *might* be the way. The idea of sequence breaking the first part complements my first point and it's really nice.
5 - Boss fights are really awesome. They are simple (due to the game as a whole being simple) yet they can be a little challenging. You have to learn the patterns and be really precise, especially when the boss is almost defeated, where his attacks become more frequent.
Neutral Things:
1 - It's important to be aware of some of the game mechanics because they might not appeal to some audiences. The combat which some people complained about, isn't as bad as they say. Anyone that played old Castlevania games is used to the "short jump and attack" strategy. If you attack while on the floor you become rooted for a few moments.
The second point is the knockback when you get hit in the air. This game is more like La-Mulana than Hollow Knight. This means that you won't have the controls to choose where your character will land. This can be frustrating in some areas with platforms, but, having played La-Mulana myself and being used to it, I don't think this is a good or bad feature.
And to finish, the short invulnerability time after getting hit is basically non-existent, so you have to play around it accordingly.
2 - There's not much variety in the enemies. I don't see this as a bad thing, because this game pays homage to simple older games, so I didn't expect to have dozens of types of enemies.
3 - Even though the name is 'Destroy Space Aliens', the enemies resemble ghosts, dragons, and demons...
Bad Things:
1 - The first message you get as you start a new game is that the game doesn't save your progress, you have to use a password system. It was cool at the first, maybe the second time. But, since I'm not playing it hours on a sitting, rather playing small bits every day, the password system soon became a chore, especially because they are not numeric, or alphanumeric, but a matrix of yes or no represented by dots. It's really tedious to put in the password every time you have to start the game.
2 - There's one thing, out of two, in Metroidvania's map system that I think it's essential. Either there's no map to buy/find, and your map is displayed as soon as you enter a new room (like ESA) or you have a bought/found grey map that starts to be displayed as soon as you visit new areas (like HK). This game has none. Even worse, the map is not so quickly found after you find a new area. For the first area, it took me a few minutes, for the second I didn't find it until I found the compass, which reveals the location of the remaining items. To access this map I needed one item that I found later in the game, for the third it took me a while. This creates two main problems: The first is always being clueless about where you are (if you don't have the map yet). The second, which I think is the worse, especially considering that this game is a Metroidvania, is that you can't know which areas you have already visited. This applies not only to before getting the map but also after. So if you think you missed a collectible, you have to revisit all the rooms on the map, since you can't know if they were already visited. I think the reason for this is the way the dev programmed the password system. Each thing you get in the game is assigned to an object, so, it would be insanely hard if he would program each room to be an object too as well.
Another bad thing regarding the whole map system is the lack of any distinction of areas in the map. Since the dev couldn't change the color of the areas, he could've at least added the name of the individual areas.
One last thing: there are only four buttons in this game, which makes the map to be included in the pause menu. I know the dev was inspired by the older generations, but I think a quick map view in a different button would be a nice addition to the q.o.l. of the game.
3 - I said that there wasn't much variety in the enemies, which was not a big issue. Well, there's not much variety in the bosses and for me, that is an issue. Bosses look like stronger variants of prior bosses, with more powerful attacks.
4 - Some enemies are not in the room yet, but they will appear after you pass a specific location in the said room. This is not an issue at all, but there is one particular enemy that appears way too fast, and, if you are running, it's almost impossible to avoid the contact damage of him appearing right in (above) your face. This frustrated me a few times. This enemy actually gets on my nerves all the time. It has a homing attack that computes your position 'till the last second, which makes it hard to avoid this attack, especially when there are more threats in the same room.
5 - Two power-ups are too hard to use since you have to use only the control buttons plus the jump button. Again, this is due to the nostalgia, but I really think they could get an exclusive button attached to them, especially because they are not so reliable to use when you wish (they are a combination of three buttons). For one of them, I could assign a single button on JoyToKey, but for the other, I couldn't. But what makes things worse is that both these power-ups were acquired really close to each other, and one of them makes the other useless. So, it didn't bother me that I couldn't use that one. That makes me think that the design of this ability is flawed or its location. Because you don't need this ability for anything, especially because the other (and better) one is so close.
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Well, as I said, I will finish the game and come back to update this review. But I really wish the dev creates another game like this, and hopefully, you will be able to save it as we do it today hehe.
Destroy Space Aliens is an awesome retro platformer that's worth picking up if you're a fan of the platforming / action-adventure genre.
The game can be pretty difficult at times -- but more often than not the game is telling you to make sure you take your time and ensure you can master each enemy. If the game is too difficult, there's now an easy mode for those that are having trouble.
After the first section, the game really takes off after an interesting turn of events (no spoilers!). Everyone who plays this game should at least get to this point as it's very unique and I haven't heard of a game besides this one that does it.
I love the sword / blast combo. It's amazing how natural it is to use both during combat.
The music in the game is great as well. It's reminiscient of the old game-boy style and can be quite catchy.
The graphics are also very well done. There's so much detail in the backgrounds that it's easy to forget the game is only 4 colors!
Overall, the game can be difficult at times, but it provides a great sense of challenge and accomplishment (and deaths are not very punishing in general). It's got some cool unique twists, and is overall a blast to play! I could very well see this being a pretty good speed game as well.
Definite reccommend to anyone who is a fan of the platforming / action-adventure genre.
Plus Side: This game got me over my addiction to Breath of The Wild
Downside: I'm now addicted to Destroy Space Aliens...
10/10 Would addict again
Challenging yet fun. Definitely a recommended buy!
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Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Flying Fire, LLC |
| Платформы | Windows |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 15.01.2025 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 64% положительных (11) |