CLASH FORCE? MORE LIKE TRASH FORCE!
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.
Oh my God, time to tackle a game that had the misfortune of falling into the "Trash" category due to bad gameplay decisions.
I'm talking Clash Force by Spicy Gyro Games.
Hero Select.
In the style of The Legend of Zelda and Super Metroid you can select one of three available save files, this works if you want to give the game a try on all the difficulties. Right after that, you're given the option of choose between three characters, so you'll probably expect to have different status like Voom (rhino) having more HP and strong firepower, but slow speed and Scorpido to be the balanced type character. ¿But guess what?, they're all the same with the same default peashooter and same weaponry options, making the character selection more "Aesthetic" in a Metal Slug like level rather than let's say Contra Hard Corps where each character had their own weapons and even exclusive skills.
Visually good, but can't say the same about gameplay.
Once you selected your character and difficulty, you'll realize that the game is more than 20 stages long along with super hard stages called "Gauntlet". You'll realize this since you are able to select the starting stage as long as you clear them.
The gameplay of Clash Force is an horizontal scrolling Run N' Gun where you can only aim frontally like Megaman, this is gonna be the fatal mistake of the whole game, but before talking about that, let's keep going with the gameplay. This weird combination of Contra enemy placement and behavior with Megaman like controls should be called "Contraman" or "Rockontra". If you're curious to know what's the difference between Normal, Hard and Expert, this is one of those cases on Indie gaming where difficulty means "Sending you with less energy and give you less items". Your normal HP levels is of 3 while on Expert is just two. Same bullshit as in Spacewing War if you ask me. Despite being Megaman-like, it has some Contra-esque weapons like rapid firing vulcans, lasers, 3-way and 5 way spread guns. While the 3 way has long range, the 5 way is mid-ranged. If you're playing on beginner, you can get a Shield item that provides you 1 hit protection against a bullet or a physical collision with an enemy. There's also medkits to replenish 1 Hit Point. Those are removed on higher difficulties, making the game less fun rather than being challenging. Another problem is that the weapons doesn't have a "strength" of their own. For example, a single bullet of the rapid vulcan does the same damage than your regular pea shooter, so if you have the 5 way spread, it will deal 5 times the damage because is -1HP each bullet.
Welcome to Bonus Stage!
At the end of each level you'll be on a bonus level where the only thing to do is to jump and try to catch a weapon as they run fast across the screen. If you're playing on Expert, this is the only time you can get the Shield item throughout the game.
Stay cool!
Someone wakes the noise up.
Boss battles are quite easy and rarely require to learn about weakpoints, as if the whole body of the boss was a huge hitbox waiting to take 100 bullets before exploding. Only the penultimate boss requires you to hit on a specific part, and it has destructible parts (cannons on the legs) which you can take down first before going after the boss. In other words, these are pure Megaman logic sub-boss fights like the snake head on Snake Man's stage (Megaman III).
WARNING! Downright unfair moves dead ahead.
Once you enter the Underground stage this is where the game is gonna get ugly. The first signs of "The game is about to go out of control" begin with enemies that come diagonally from above and below which most of the times will hit you and unless you jump to another platform behind your position, there's nothing you can do, along with cannons placed below you which you can't shoot due to their position, fully exploiting your disability of being able of fire in any other direction. This is where the "Contraman" idea falls on its own, you can't survive a multidirectional fast enemy attack by simply shooting straight forward, this is universally known among Run N' Gun developers, and that's why they grant the player the ability to aim in the basic 8 directions (4 in the case of Metal Slug and Cyber Lip since they're a little more slow paced). Unless you are some weird Kaizo-hack loving enthusiast that would be fun for you. To make things worse, when you're hit you lose your weapon which makes no sense since you're not dead yet leaving you with the pea shooter, but like I said before, all weapons are the same in damage terms. The fortress level has also cannons that aim in all 8 directions and are both unreachable and indestructible. For a final insult-to-injury, if you die, the game sends you back to the beginning of the level, something that will be very, very common if you're playing on Expert or in the Gauntlet stages prior to the final boss. While dodging obstacles like spinning blades, hopping on mushrooms and avoiding laser traps could be fun and challenging, the room for error and lack of checkpoints just take the fun away. While you have infinite lives, practically there's no Game Over, but its still frustrating that you have to re-learn the level from start after dying on the third fourth segment of a long stage because the game lacks of checkpoints on the stages.
While gameplay is weak, the audiovisual department is the complete opposite, with NES perfect graphics that recreate the style of Megaman III to VI (Desert Area I is basically a nod to Hard Man's stage) along with Disney's Darkwing Duck and Konami's NES Bucky O'Hare game, the graphic quality feels like an official NES game rather than your typical "I want to be retro style, so I made lame graphics" that plague most retro games. While the platforming levels are traditionally slow, there's speed moments in the game like the Missile jumping level which clearly nods the missile moments of Contra III: The Alien Wars, Contra: Shattered Soldier and Super Turrican 2. The character design is based on anthropomorphic animals in the style of "Saturday Morning" cartoons such as Darkwing Duck, Street Sharks and Swat Kats: The Radical Squadron and it does the job quite well, I can even compare the sprite work with the NES Bucky O'Hare game. It's clear that the developers wanted to give us a professional work and this is where they excelled. The music department omits the chiptune music and decides to be modern with a fast, upbeat and action paced soundtrack in the styled of action cartoons of the early 2000's with a few spirit of doujin style platformer with the "Daran-dan!" trumpeting that's oh-so-common on doujin games, but they fit quite well in this game. The only weakness is that you can hear when it loops as if someone pressed the "back" button on the music player rather than looping in specific parts of the song in order to make a short song sound longer.
Just "Going Retro" with a few problems to deal with.
Clash Force tries to evoke the classic Run N' Gun era of the NES, but with the wrong control settings and unbalanced difficulty, makes what it had to be fun to become frustrating and infuriating. If you're looking for "Saturday Morning" inspired games, try Cuphead or Spidersaurs, just forget about Clash Force unless you're looking for a "Pick-Play-Uninstall" trophy/achievement boost.
If only your gameplay wasn't this bad...