Terra-Bomber (PlayStation 4)

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Sturmvogel Prime
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Terra-Bomber (PlayStation 4)

Post by Sturmvogel Prime »

TRASHFALL FINAL (PART VII)
TRASHOCALYPSE... WHAT, NOW?




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Heavy Shmup Bombardment

The gameplay of Terra-Bomber is simple as Defender and Scramble: Destroy both air and ground targets. Your ship is equipped with a frontal laser for air-to-air attack and the bomb for ground targets. Picking stars scattered across the levels will grant you support fire in the style of the Rolling Option from Gradius III. But in this case, the "Options" rotate infront of the ship rather than around it. These are also the bonus score factor of the game, since you'll get a special bonus for picking all of them. Since your ship consumes fuel like in River Raid, so you have to destroy gas containers in order to regain your fuel. They can be destroyed by either your frontal fire or your bombs.
Bombing in this game is the worst of all, 'cos rather than the standard vertical bomb-drop, it goes down doing a curved fall, like the Holy Water or the Axe in Castlevania, and the dropping trajectory changes as you move the ship around, even dropping backwards and going up for a while before finally falling. This makes the Trophy of destroying all the Gas containers very difficult. Also, you can destroy the trees around that decorate the stage, but it is best not to do it 'cos they take 5 points away from your score. The game lacks of D-Pad support, forcing you to use the Analog Stick. But the problems lie in the gameplay itself. The worst problem is the tunnels where enemy placement ranges from bad to terrible, as homing missiles will suddenly try to intercept you and there's little space to navigate and try to destroy them.



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The luck (and the game) stops here.

Stage 4 is the "Show Stopper" of the game due to fucked up enemy placement, this is no longer "Bad Enemy Placement" and sorry for the word. Near the end of the level, there's a tight tunnel that requires vertical navigation, but there's five turrets on both sides of the pillar. While you can destroy the ones facing you with your shots, the ones behind you are impossible to take down and impossible to dodge. If you avoid one, the turret below will hit you. This is where the game progression is halted, and to make things worse, if you die once, you have to start the level all over again. Like R-Type Final 2, there's no extra lives if you're hoping for a recovery through score racking and to close things with a nailed coffin, there's no continues if you ran out of lives, effectively forcing you to start all the way back from the beginning.
This game features trophies to justify the purchase: Surviving without losing a life, destroying all the gas containers in a level, don't destroy a single tree on any stage and the level cleared ones. You might get the first three objectives and the first three stages of the game due to the problem mentioned before, making "Trophy Hunting" an impossible game to win, and it doesn't surprise me that I'm not the only one who didn't got the trophies. According to TrueTrophies, NOBODY has unlocked trophies beyond Stage 4.



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Small sprites and dark corridors.

Graphically, feels like if someone tried to make a crappy version of Scramble and Vanguard and passed it through an HD filter, but with horrible colors and all the times with a black sky. The only difference is the gradient color on the bottom which could be green, red or blue. The ship and enemies are almost like crappy silhouettes that look like bad cardboard cutouts with no details. It's pure lazy and lack of effort in the design. Not to mention, your ship is very small.
The sound department is just playing "The Ride of the Valkyries" (A.K.A. the Apocalypse Now theme) for 5-6 minutes over and over and over again. Like those old CD based games, the song ends and then repeats rather than looping in specific parts for a never-ending effect.



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No one is happy afer this, Nina.

To end this review, all I can say is that Terra-Bomber is "Impossible on Purpose" where one single mistake is capable of make the whole thing collapse without being able to do something and the lesser ones just render the game to a virtually unplayable condition.
If you want to break your head trying to clear level 4 or enjoys a badly programmed shmup, then this is for you.



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The "Lea Scale" collapsed after this.
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