RED-CRAP-TOR
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.
LIST OF PESTILENCE - THE TRASHSTORM SO FAR...
Spoiler
I: EXIT TRASHFALL, WELCOME TRASHSTORM (POWER-DEAD BY BREAKTHROUGH GAMING) - (Nik & Kit's Math Quiz)
II: UNINSPIRED SPACE SHOOTOUTS - (X-Force Genesis)
III: NIGHTMARE DRIVING ON THE TRASH GAME ROAD - (Driverio)
IV: AGE OF DEVELOPER STUPIDITY - (Game Achievements "Stroke The Pet" Series)
V: TAKE THE TROPHIES, I DON'T WANT THEM! - (Rocketio)
VI: SUPERDISASTROUS SPACE SHOOTER SQUAD - (Super Rebellion)
VII: MYRON SAID "CRAPPY HOLIDAYS" - (Breakthrough Gaming: The Continents)
VIII: BREAK-TURD GAMING...AGAIN - (Project: Summer Ice - Pinball)
IX: DEEP SPACE ATROCITY - (Deep Space Anomaly)
X: ZAKYM'S DISASTROUS RETURN - (Rocketio 2 and 3)
XI: CRAPPER BOWL AND THE END OF BREAKTHROUGH GAMING - (Breakthrough Gaming's Football 2)
XII: ALPHA MORON - (Alpha Warrior by S-Mobile)
XIII: THE DEEP FREEZE - (SoulFrost by Xitilon)
XIV: WEBNETIC'S FIRST SHOOTER - (Space Defend by Webnetic)
XV: ONE BUTTON CATASTROPHE - (B Cannon by Xitilon)
XVI: CLASH FORCE? MORE LIKE TRASH FORCE! - (Clash Force)
XVII: TAURIAN MANURE - (Taurian Defense)
XVIII: INHUMAN ROAD: STINKING TURD LIGHTNING - (Thunder by Xitilon)
XIX: MORE XITILON TRASH - (S Lanes by Xitilon)
XX: TRASH-O-WEEN PRESENTS: CRAPPER-5 - (Hyper-5)
II: UNINSPIRED SPACE SHOOTOUTS - (X-Force Genesis)
III: NIGHTMARE DRIVING ON THE TRASH GAME ROAD - (Driverio)
IV: AGE OF DEVELOPER STUPIDITY - (Game Achievements "Stroke The Pet" Series)
V: TAKE THE TROPHIES, I DON'T WANT THEM! - (Rocketio)
VI: SUPERDISASTROUS SPACE SHOOTER SQUAD - (Super Rebellion)
VII: MYRON SAID "CRAPPY HOLIDAYS" - (Breakthrough Gaming: The Continents)
VIII: BREAK-TURD GAMING...AGAIN - (Project: Summer Ice - Pinball)
IX: DEEP SPACE ATROCITY - (Deep Space Anomaly)
X: ZAKYM'S DISASTROUS RETURN - (Rocketio 2 and 3)
XI: CRAPPER BOWL AND THE END OF BREAKTHROUGH GAMING - (Breakthrough Gaming's Football 2)
XII: ALPHA MORON - (Alpha Warrior by S-Mobile)
XIII: THE DEEP FREEZE - (SoulFrost by Xitilon)
XIV: WEBNETIC'S FIRST SHOOTER - (Space Defend by Webnetic)
XV: ONE BUTTON CATASTROPHE - (B Cannon by Xitilon)
XVI: CLASH FORCE? MORE LIKE TRASH FORCE! - (Clash Force)
XVII: TAURIAN MANURE - (Taurian Defense)
XVIII: INHUMAN ROAD: STINKING TURD LIGHTNING - (Thunder by Xitilon)
XIX: MORE XITILON TRASH - (S Lanes by Xitilon)
XX: TRASH-O-WEEN PRESENTS: CRAPPER-5 - (Hyper-5)
Remember what I said on Hyper-5's review about being up to your neck in shit?
This review is about another shmup that will make you feel even worse: You're gonna be up to your nose in shit: RedRaptor by Novax Games and EastAsiaSoft.
Space battle in planet Overpixellia.
The first thing we will notice about this vertical shooter is that the controls are incomplete. ¿How?, Have you imagined a bullet hell shmup where you can't move diagonally and you have to tap "left-up-left-up" or "Right-down-right-down" to move? Well, this is the game. In a bullet hell, this is a critical flaw which means the difference between life and death, and in RedRaptor's case, it defines that. This game lacks of in-game power ups (I'll explain why later) for your shots, but drops a few items to help you along the way. "S" is Spread Bullet (S-Bullet) which fires an 8-way green bullet volley in multiple directions, helping you with most of the enemies and obstacles in the way, like the horizontal laser cannons of Level 3. "R" is the Rocket, a frontal-fired twin missile shot that causes strong damages to the enemies. "P" is for Power, which provides a boost to your shots, but its lost when you pick any other weapon, there's a "Crescent Moon" shaped weapon that fires on the sides and finally, there's the shield icon gives you the Shield, a spheric barrier that provides you protection against 4 shots. This weapon configuration tries to be like Compile's classics like Aleste and Zanac A.I., minus the fun since these sub-weapons can't be powered up.
Along with the item assortment you have one super attack: The "Ultimate Skill" which transforms your jet into a robot and fires a "murderbeam" like Hien's "Ninja Beam" in Aero Fighters.
Campaign is the main mode of the game, and the sole excuse of call this campaign rather than "Game Start" is the story behind it where you're given the role of Raptor 1, who's sent on a mission against an alien faction called L.A.W. that for non-specified reasons, they're the antagonists of the game. Rather than using cutscenes or in-game graphics, the game drops the plotline with crappy text interruptions before starting the level in the style of Sisters Royale and Triggerheart Exelica's "Story Mode". Back to the gameplay, the survival of the player is more based on which sub-weapon you're carrying. If you have the S-Bullet you'll defintely gonna make it despite the weakness of the ship. But you can't rely on sub-weapon strength all the time, and that's where the game plays shit on you. To begin with, you Energy-Spare Lives system is a mess. You only have 2 points of health, and your lives rather than blowing up and respawning, they act more like the Energy Tanks on a Metroid game, refilling the bar when its depleted. However, if you collide with an enemy, is instant death regardless of how many lives you had left. Dying once and you'll be forced to restart the game from Level 1 by either picking Restart or Main Menu. For a bullet hell-based title, it has moments where the game relies on obstacle navigation, and that's Levels 3 and 5, which slows the bullet spam in favor of dodging stage hazards like laser traps and spikes. There's a brief moment in Level 4 where you'll be navigating through missiles, but resuming the bullet hell premise. As a bullet hell game, it is more based on the Aero Fighters grade where the bullet splashes are focused more on speed rather than bullet spamming like DoDonPachi or Touhou Project, and this is where having a weak main weapon only makes the boss battle last longer than necessary.
The boss fights. By God, they're awful, all bosses go like this: Drain 1/2 of the first life bar and they'll go away for a while until they reappear, repeat again until the first bar is depleted, and then they'll stay until the second life bar is gone. I mean, why do they have to run off rather than fight you?, In any normal shmup they stay in place until they're vulnerable again. For instance Triggerheart Exelica and Blazing Star where the boss can lose parts and they're still on screen rather than fleeing like cowards.
They don't even cared...
Can you say "PATHETIC"? After completing the five levels, you'll be getting this lame ending where Raptor 1 enters through a portal with weird eyes and...Thanks for playing, RedRaptor will return. Zero clues about the reinforcements or where the hell the portal leads to, a disastrous cliffhanger as bad as Hyper-5 just for the sake of throwing us a "Sequel Threat" that we don't know if they'll complete or not.
The Megadeth Principle: Peace Sells, but Who's Buying?
Remember when I mentioned the lack of power ups? Here's the reason why. This game has a store in the style of U.N. Squadron and Fantasy Zone where you can buy upgrades, increase the power of your ship and the width of its bullets and additional weapons. Like most games, the price increases on each purchase, implying grinding. Fortunately Novax Games noticed that and gave us the option of buying a "multiplier" that doubles the coins for the next gameplay, allowing you to get even more upgrades faster and increase your chances of surviving in the game. If you had enough of the game you can burn 5,000 coins for a "Start at Level 5" warping you to the final level, but in my opinion its a waste of coins if you consider that you'll be losing a chance of getting more money to upgrade the RedRaptor further.
Clearing the game will unlock the "Arcade Mode" which is pretty much the same game minus the text interruptions. But with the crappy ending, is just a waste of time. Like all the latest games, it has Trophies/Achievements acting as another addition to the list of Gamerscore Milkers: Buy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 upgrades and clear each level of the game, there you go: 11 Golds and 1 Platinum for your PlayStation 4/5 and 1000 Gamerscore points for your XBOX. ¿Got Them All? Good job. Uninstall the game once you've get them. RedRaptor is gaming junk food. But you want to know what's the most saddest, pathethic aspect of this game? It is advertised as "a vertical shoot'em up inspired by genre classics of the '90s". FUCK THAT, Kuhga: Operation Code "Vapor Trail" and Geikirindan play much better than this shit.
At first I thought it was one of the Z-Bots.
¿What happened with those toys?
Graphically, RedRaptor yells "Homemade" on the simplicity of its 16-Bit-esque graphics. While the Raptor 1, the enemies and the bosses sprites are well made, they lack of animation as they don't do banking or turning animations to give the feel they're in constant movement. I could say "It's like the Silver Hawk on the first Darius", but in Darius that was because it was one of the first 80's games to carry out character animations, while in RedRaptor's case, its more like low-budget reasons. There's a few animation instances in the game and that's the enemy turret cannons and the Raptor 1 when it transforms during the Ultimate Skill, but its blocked due to the absurdely giant "LASER GUN ACTIVATED" text on the screen when it is performed. Some details are missing due to the excess of graphics. For instance Level 1 where a layer of semi-translucent clouds barely let us see a city below them. Space 2 is incredibly detailed on the artificial structures background, but suffers from pixelation inconsistencies. Like the cloud layers in Level 1, Level 2's planets are overpixelated and that makes things clash with each other as scenery as they don't look uniform. This overpixelation also hits the interface on the sides of the screen. For some reason there's a QR code-like thing on the upper left part of the screen and briefly seen in the background of Level 3. In fact, Level 3's panels are used as the "closing window" transition screen. The fourth and fifth level at least are the mostly animated of the game as they pull a spinning planet/moon on the background and the scrolling parallax on the alien cave background giving us something more animated than the rest of the whole game. You are given the option to enable or disable the default CRT Mode, which only makes the game look like a bad local TV channel.
Disney and Fox are not gonna be happy with this.
For an indie game, there's some things ripped-off from other games and even movies. One of them are the gunships that are blatant copies of the AT-99 Scorpion from Avatar (the Na'vi movie, not the Nickelodeon cartoons), along with purple and green knock offs of the Tie Advanced from Star Wars.
There's More (Shooting) Than Meets The Eye.
Looks like there's more "Homages". In stage 2 you'll be facing these purple forward-swept winged ships that resemble the Decepticon Cyclonus from the Transformers franchise.
Proof that you're an Oldschooler: Your logo is on the Highway to the Danger Zone.
If you said "RedRaptor's logo was familiar for me", you're right. It is more than obvious the developer is someone who grew up with Top Gun, or tried to be as 80's as possible and picked a Top Gun styled logo to do so. Better nodding Top Gun is more 80's/classic than using the "He-Man font" like Star Wars does nowadays. RedRaptor promises to be the new "Danger Zone" and take your breath away, but "I ain't worried" to say it fails miserably.
Now, let's talk about the sound department of this game. Unlike the graphics, the music is quite good as it borrows influences from Tangerine Dream on the use of a fast new-age/alternative styled soundtrack rather than the traditional chiptune-ish music and this Tangerine Dream approach sounds great in the game as it breaks with the oh-so-common techno-industrial mix that plague most indie shmups nowadays. While the sound effects are videogame-ish, the big explosion sounds could be annoying as they're way too loud as we have these Atari-like "KHHHHHHMMMHH!!!" noises when a big 6 turret vessel blows out of existence.
REDTRIVIAPTOR
- The RedRaptor resembles a mix between Raiden and Super Aleste/Space Megaforce ship.
- The robot to jet transformation for the Ultimate Skill might be a nod to the X-36 from Strikers 1945 III/Strikers 1999.
- The blue robots from Levels 3 and 4 have the serial number 01E, which can be a nod to "DIE".
- It is unknown what S.U.O.S. stands for.
I hate to say it Nina, but I agree with Shizuka this time.
RedRaptor tries to be like Aleste, DoDonPachi and Aero Fighters in all of its sincerity, but the bad controls, graphics flaws and the plagiarized things make it lose its potential as a good indie shmup. I mean, why these quality problems on indie shmups? I mean, if indie RPGs like CrossCode and Sea of Stars can be as amazing as the greatest commercial games in terms gameplay, graphics and sound, why not indie shmups? I'm not talking Japanese doujin shmups, those are a different story. A GREAT example of a well executed Indie shmup was pieslice's Crisis Wing which was an incredible tribute to Toaplan's Truxton/Tatsujin, and that was a one man's project. So a whole team like Novax Games couldn't do something equal or better than that? That mean's somethings REALLY wrong here.
Wish we can see an indie shmup that can rival with let's say U.N. Squadron, Thunder Force V: Perfect System or Triggerheart Exelica. THAT would be incredible and I'd definitely buy it. Unfortunately, indie shooting most of the times is stucked on the old adage "Good, Fast, Cheap...pick two" and go for the option where "Good" is out of the equation.
Great, now Edalune Grant is sad.
¿Are you proud of yourselves, Novax Games?