Nova Wing III

Nova Wing III is a Shoot 'Em Up game.

So many things were wrong with this game, it's such a shame. The graphics and the music are both alright, but everything else falls short, is badly thought about or is actually broken. Apparently your shield gets stronger as you level up, but I have yet to see this: grinding a little against a wall is an instant kill no matter what. The fuel is sometimes super scarce and you end up running out or dying trying to rush for some. On the main menu it says to click Enter or RMB to change shooting patterns, but at no point throughout the game it does anything...

The destructible environment is nice, but most of the level designs looks quite random to be honest. The game is very short, completable in under 30 minutes. There's only 12 levels and not much replayability. There's different backgrounds but all levels are pretty much the same. There's no bosses or anything, just enemies and terrain. The controls are stiff and it also feels like you're moving on ice, increasing your already good chance to hit the narrow tunnels you have to go through during the entire game.

Overall, Nova Wing 1 was pretty good, Nova Wing 2 was meh and this one is just... kind of not very good either.

A more tight-quarters take on the Nova Wing series. Escape your captives and return to your fleet. A new mechanic in this game was added, that being the fuel mechanic. Mine fuel reserves using your guns, another cool feature, being the ability to destroy the terrain, that will definitely come in handy during your escape!

I do however, wish there was a boss at the end, but for what it's worth, it's still a good game!

Nova Wing III is a very poorly made side scrolling bullet hell/shmup, essentially a ripoff of R-Type, but with twin stick shooter mechanics that make the whole thing worse. It's shallow and entirely uninteresting.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game library/engine, SDL2. It's rarely used, because it's arguably worse than construction kits like GameMaker Studio, RPGMaker and Clickteam Fusion, but it's also much harder to work with. Despite this, SDL2 has very limited capabilities, which go some way to explaining the poor quality of the game. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

Nova Wing III is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

Mediocre shmup.
No bosses, no power-ups (well, the gun is updated the more you shoot, but it only improves shooting speed), only 12 levels.
Odd system with the fuel - you have to shoot red areas to get red clouds with fuel. Just another distracting factor.
UI looks weird. The is a story, but why.

it's kinda like roblox

The most utterly boring shooter that I ever played. You need constantly shoot for fuel in the walls so there is no time to do anything
else. Leaking fueltanks on the ship it seems more like. The game could be renamed to " LEAKING FUELTANKS III" since I´m quite sure the other 2 games was of equally dumb idea with the fuel.

- Dull music.
- Not possible to configure it for 2 players with Xbox360 gamepads.

Shootemups I like:
Delta C64
Menace Amiga
Pixel junkies
Echoes.

Return to its roots, Nova Wing III is a level-based shoot 'em up, its twist being destructible walls.

After the brief excursion to arcade scorelandia with Nova Wing II, the third iteration in the series is again a shmup with distinct levels.

This time around, each level has walls and neater yet, they're destructible! You also have to collect red fuel from the walls because apparently it keeps your ship from exploding.

Beware of the walls

As a shooter, Nova Wing III is not as strong as the first two games. Enemies are weak and won't shoot back, a lot anyway. I found the most danger from flying too close to the walls to kill a bunch of enemies behind me in another corridor for a highscore.

Like previous two games, you gain more firepower and better shields for collecting green "score dust" from enemies.

This time, you also need to keep the fuel levels up by collecting red fuel dust, released from the walls. In only a couple of levels was this challenging. It's cool that sometimes you actually had to dig to both the forward and/or to gain enough fuel to survive.

Surprisingly, it's still not as hard as (the lightly challenging) first two games.

Controls: Keyboard+mouse or a controller

It's hardly surprising that the controls are the same as before: twin-stick scheme (or k+m) works well, especially with auto-fire toggled.

With the risk of sounding like a broken clock, I did not test the multiplayer (no one to play with). There's local and LAN options.

This time co-op might be pretty fun: there's often two corridors, one for each, and sometimes hardly enough fuel for both players, which could be interesting.

Fun but short shooter

Slightly longer than previous games, 30 minutes was all that was needed to beat all the levels. It's a good length since I was getting bored at that point. Afterwards, someone could go for highscores in the leaderboards, but since it's rather slow-paced, I wouldn't bother playing it again.

For a single playthrough it's an okay game, so I'd recommend it on sale.

~Twistorian Curator~