DEEP SPACE ATROCITY
TRASHSTORM IS NOT A REAL STORY.
IS NOT EVEN GOOD FICTION.
IS TRASH GAME REVIEWS.
ALL OF THE GAMES FEATURED WOULD CAUSE A PERSON DISAPPOINTMENT,
ANGER, FRUSTRATION, DEPRESSION, MONEY LOSS INCLUDED.
TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME.
Here we go with the trash shmup reviews.
We've just started 2023 and it's trash review time, and to make things a little worse, we will check Deep Space Anomaly.
God help us all...
Plays even uglier than it looks.
Have you ever had the feeling things all of a sudden went out of control? ¿No?, Then that's precisely what happens on Deep Space Anomaly.
The game starts with no explanation of the plot. Right after you are on the main menu, you can decide if you want to start the game or reset the wave, this option is used when you screw up making wrong choices in the game. Let's go with the game. The gameplay is an arena-like shmup where your main objective is to survive 30 waves of enemies by clearing the level each stage without dying once. Rather than having a total number of enemies to defeat, your HUD will display a percentage as your progress indicator. The best part of the game is that along with your basic shot, you can carry a very vast plethora of additional weaponry giving you some fun trying different weapons for the sake of experimenting, along with the 360 aiming, which is gonna be useful in this game. You can perform combos that will increase the money you can obtain in this game and you'll be using in between levels. This game really had the potential to be fun and decent if it wasn't for the universe of problems that plague this game which I'll talk about later.
Everything has a price, even your fire rate.
Once you've finished a level, you can enter the store where you can buy upgrades for your ship and even new and more effective weapons, and weapons can be upgraded constantly, from the essential damage dealt to enemies to fire rate and increase their ammo stock to outrageous high levels (like 2000 bullets for instance). The only flaw here is that the upgrades will increase their price on each upgrade, making things like life increase and regeneration per second the most expensive after a couple dozen upgrades.
At least they've made multi-part bosses.
In some levels you'll be facing bosses and enemies composed by multiple parts which increases the fun factor a little more. Well, those are the positive aspects of the game, time to talk about the bunch of problems that plague the game. To begin with, the ship's movement is way too slow, making you an easy target, even for the excuse of paying for increase your speed, you don't have to be an "Almost-Sitting Duck" which will gonna happen up to level 5. Second is the unfair difficulty, as you progress in the game the enemy rather than chasing you and shoot you, they will be moving on speeds beyond the "Damn, they're fast" level 'cos they'll be on one side of the screen to another and even away in less than three seconds, and sometimes they will to cheap and downright cruel tactics like "Anchor Lock" you with either a hook or a beam, temporally paralizing you on pure Triggerheart Exelica style, only this time you're the locked target (now you know how it feels to be a Ver'mith), but the worst of all is when the enemies suddenly ram and bump at your ship nonstop until you're a goner, not to mention the drill-equiped ships that will drain your life bar in a flash. Also, there's no recovery time between hits or bullets, which means "Turridamage". Yeah, the fucking Turridamage shit all over again is the worst of all and combined with the one life and you're dead, is pure rage quit. Fortunately you can continue where you left off and with the money you've got on that stage, but you can buy before starting the level and even in-between if you have some time and fast D-Pad reflexes which was a wise move that I approve, being able to buy in-between levels. Unfortunately, you have to survive the level if you want to carry the upgraded stuff or else it'll reset to its previous state. For some reason, the game doesn't pause when you enter the store. So you'll be extremely vulnerable to enemy collisions and fire while buying. Another major problem is the ammo capacity. You have to reload them everytime they ran out of ammo and that means wait times, some of them of 9 or more seconds. But what makes that far worse is having your default weapon with limited ammo and reload times too, While I can understand that on the unlockable weaponry, limiting the default pea-shooter just makes you EVEN MORE vulnerable. You can increase their "cartridge" capacity on the store, but that only delays the inevitable, you'll run out of ammo and you'll have to wait until it reloads again. The weapon aiming is also sluggish as hell, at the point that an 100 year old man aiming a gun look like sniper reflexes.
Kill those things before attacking the boss.
¿Why it had to be so cryptic?
If all the shit mentioned before wasn't bad enough, the game goes even beyond imbecility with the final boss battle. To begin with, it has the same insane speed problem as the rest of the enemies in the game, which means it is as hyperactive as a kid after a dose of 3 Monster Energy cans and 10 sugar bags. After clearing above 92% percent of the screen you'll think the boss comes next right?, No. In order to damage the boss you have to kill a few translucent flower-like things and then you can attack the boss. But guess what? Your regular bullets and the machine gun weapons are ineffective against it. ¿Is the game glitched or something? No. Believe it or not, you have to buy the Flamethrower and the "Wave" like cannon to damage the boss but you have to attack it with the flamethrower first and then use the Wave cannon to finish it off. This is like the final boss of Wrath of the Black Manta, where if you didn't knew which and when to use the specific ninja techniques, you'll never be able to beat the boss. ¿Why it has to be that cryptic? I mean having 1000000 HP is already a challenge, do they really needed to do the "Figure out its weakness" thing?. If you don't knew that you'll be screwed.
Yeah, that's your craptastic reward for suffering throughout your mission.
If you're expecting a decent reward for all your troubles and 30 demential levels of bad programmed shmup, this is definitely not your game. The only thing that happens in the end is that your ship flies away as the camera zooms away, after that you'll be on the credits. Is like someone suddenly appeared next to you and said: "Thank you, but your well drawn cutscenes and anime-styled girls are in another universe. Have this list of names and your 10 achievements for playing the game. Have a nice day." Yeah, 10 fucking achievements for playing this shit that won't help you right now 'cos you'll be wishing a god damned refund.
Graphically, I can call this Flash-game like since they're not sprites but illustrations like a high quality flash game. Being your ship and the large enemies the best part due to their detailing and the premise of being multiparted for the sake of improving the gameplay. Your only scenario will be space, but with a bunch of planets scattered unrealistically as their orbits look way too close to each other. The asteroids are 3D rendered but that's hard to appreciate due to the insane speeds of the game. As for the music, the game throws you a very 2000's like techno-electronic mix that sounds like club music of those days. Nothing short of poetry, and maybe the only good part of the whole game.
Gamer depression guaranteed.
Deep Space Anomaly is a cruel joke for a shmup which makes you wonder "How does games like this one make their way to the online store?" because this game has zero quality in gameplay terms at the point that feels like a very unplayable shmup. This could easily be "The Worst Shmup of 2023", although that's way too soon since we're starting the year, but only God knows what's gonna happen on the indie shmup scenery right now.
No need to explain what this means.