Like Atari's E.T., the title screen is the best part of the game.
Oh, my God. Eastasiasoft and Panda Indie Studio are back at it again. This time is Red Death.
Nick the Demon Hunter, in Eye injuring Red-N'-Green!
The plot of this game is simple: You, as Nick "Red-001", you've got to destroy the demons who are taking over the Earth.
This is a vertical scrolling shooter that relies on basic enemy formations combined with bullet hells. Like in Project Starship, you don't have a bomb to clear the screen. Instead, you're given the ability of slowing down the game's speed allowing you to navigate through the multiple bullets. There's three weapons in this game to help you: Power, which is your default weapon that shoots a stream of bullets, Laser which shoots a screen-tall laser beam, and Missile, a projectile that goes full forward. All the three weapons are "Linear" shots, thus all of them have the same problem: They're not wide enough to take enemies on the sides, and that's what sometimes you'll be facing. That's where you'll have to pass from the offensive to the evasive if you don't want to lose a ship or two, although there's "Ship" items that grant you an extra life.
The game provides you with a special attack called Overload, which is powered up by picking stars obtained by destroying enemies. Keep in mind, you can only use this once the gauge is full and worse; losing a ship will reset the Overload gauge.
The game only has 3 stages on its main mode, resulting in a very short game. So what does this game do?: Being extremely difficult with bullet hells and rely on the "No continues" if you die just to make the game more harder than usual.
After clearing the game, you'll unlock the Arcade Mode, which randomly generates stages and boss battles, the only problem with that is that the boss variety isn't too much, so you'll end up fighting the same boss more than once, except for a brain with an eye that relies on huge laser cheap shots of "trap you on the sides" and a random laser in the center.
The achievements are extremely easy to get: get killed 18 times, deploy 5 Overloads, kill 180 enemies, kill 4 bosses, get 80,000 points. Yeah, another pathetic "BPF" (Buy, Play and Forget) Gamerscore Milker where you'll get everything in around half hour.
The Super Game Boy had more colors than this.
Graphically, it relies on the retro 8-bit nostalgia...done wrong, as it uses a color palette of red, green, dark green and white making it look strange at the point of being a strange fusion between the Wonderswan and the Virtual Boy. Only the Title Screen is the best part of the game (just like the infamous E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial on the Atari 2600), and honestly, the Super Game Boy had more colors than this game. Red Death is just another example of retro potential down the drain.
Another negative of this game is the swearing. Like Sine Mora EX, this game throws 4 letter profanities, so if you're the kind of person that gets easily offended by those words, then Red Death will be offensive for you, in anyway this shmup is another "Not suitable for children" if you're looking for a shmup to play with the family.
The Pajama Kid VS Mumm-Ra The Malnourished. ¿Who wins?, who cares.
The character design is in the "Absolute Borderline" between Uninspired and Generic. Nick, your pilot looks like a generic dude in his red pajamas, while the bosses lack of creativity; a brain with an eye that looks like a rip-off of Brain Golem from Salamander or Searle from Contra III The Alien Wars, a huge shadow with eyes and Nyarlathotep, who looks more like what happened to Mumm-Ra The Everliving after all these years since ThunderCats was cancelled; his former menacing form really decayed in a terrible case of malnutrition as we've got this joke of an egyptian themed enemy. They've should learn from Capcom's Forgotten Worlds.
The music, is as the graphics, an attempt at retro style, with a suspensful Castlevania-like chiptune soundtrack that later blends techno-trance styled beats to make it faster and intense but it becomes boring and forgettable.
RED CURIOSITIES
- The game is a prequel to Project Starship and Project Starship X, conforming the Project Starship trilogy.
- Nick is Gwen's father.
- The console versions omit the "Hero" and "A New Game Mode" achievements obtained after completing a game.
- The phrase "Red-001 Report! Red-001?! RED?!" is a reference to "Snake, respond!, Snake? SNAAAAAKE!!" from the Game Over screen of Metal Gear Solid.
This boss is a formless shadow, formless as this game is.
I want to say something good about this game, but i can't, since the overall product is just bad. Don't bother with this game, Red Death tries to be as addicting as Ghost Blade HD, but in the end is just another Gamerscore Milker that sucked your hard earned money for 1,000 points.
Stay away from this game and save those five bucks for better shmups.
TO QUTE CORPORATION: ¿Where's Ginga Force when we need it?, the XBOX One really needs that game.