SURVIVING THE UNSPEAKABLE FATHOMS OF GAMING
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.
Part II of this Unholy Week Special. Today we will see Marine Survivors for the XBOX One and Series X|S.
The magic of underwater fighting.
The first thing to do is to pick the spell for your whale. This means Weapon Select in any other game. By far you can only choose the Iceball as the default weapon since the others require to win money or complete challenges.
The Subaquatic Arena.
The gameplay of Marine Survivors is an arena shooter but GOD DAMN THE CONTROLS ARE FUCKING HORRIBLE! You might expect to aim with the right Analog Stick, but looks like the dickheads who made this game decided to fuck that up. Why? Because the aim is linked up to the player movement, when you move up, the whale fires up, and firing is also fucked up. Your initial weapon has a fire rate of three bullets on screen and then wait as if its reloading. When basic aspects such as these are fucked up, you know this game is a disaster already, but guess what? It makes a turn for the even worse. Unlike most games that require to kill an enemy to level up, here you have to kill the enemy and then grab the blue coin they drop to obtain the experience point required to gradually fill the experience bar on top of the screen (quite Raiden Nova-esque, don't you think?). Fortunately, the "Experience Coins" doesn't disappear and they stay in the game until you pick'em up. The main objective here is to survive 20 minutes, and that requires not just take down enemies, but three different bosses: White Shark, Anglerfish and Megalodon. Once you take down a boss, the game' will throw stronger enemies claiming you angered the monsters. Despite the game asks you to survive 20 minutes, the game lasts forever as long as you can stay alive in the game.
30% Chance of winning, 70% of screwing it up.
Like most roguelite games and Raiden Nova as well, there's the "Select one of three upgrades" option after leveling up. These upgrades increase key status such as your firing rate, give you more HP or simply give you more money or reducing the experience required to level up. Keep in mind, the game features "Challenges" that require to max up each and every random upgrade to unlock newer weapons and upgrades. Upgrades vary on their required levels to max up. Some are at level 5 and others in level 7, but basically once you reach level 60 or so you'll maxed up all of them.
Like in Raiden Nova, the upgrades are their respective slots for weapons and statuses, Marine Survivors only grants you 5 for both for a total of 10, 2 less than Raiden Nova's 12 slots.
Profit or Staying Alive?
Your choice.
After maxing up all of your 10 status and powers, the game will drop the courtesy of allowing you to select if you want to recover some health or get a little money. Being honest with you, I suggest you pick the money, the sooner you buy everything in the game's upgrade shop, the sooner you'll be free of this Achievement/Gamerscore Milker trap you've fell on it.
This can only be described as "Overspammed".
Difficulty is completely unbalanced. After upgrading a few levels in your first runs you'll be massively outnumbered by the enemy 'cos the game will flood the screen with enemies, and even the basic enemies take more than 3 hits to die if you didn't upgraded the Iceball shot, and even after a few level ups, you will get killed due to the enemy filled screen, implying a total lack of balance in gameplay. Compare that with Raiden Nova. Even on "Very Hard" which was the highest difficulty level, it was challenging, but at least fair since it threw considerable numbers, but gave you controls and abilities to make it through, while Marine Survivors is just pure difficulty chaos worsened with the slowest controls possible and terrible firing-aiming for an arena shooter.
Additional upgrades to turn the tide on your favor.
After dying in the game and returning to the main menu, you can buy a permanent upgrade in the Upgrade screen, this unlocks new weapons and strengthens your whale's capabilities increasing your chances of surviving and inflicting more damage, which is not a bad idea for any game when the balance between power, challenge and fun factor is done appropiately. Well, in this case, you can overpower your whale at the point that combined with the randomly given weapons and upgrades will basically make you invincible. Yeah, you can't lose the game once you've bought all the upgrades of the store because you'll be so overpowered your enemies will die fast despite the absurd numbers the game throw you and the bosses will just retreat as they take a hit. If you're virtually invincible and almighty ¿How are you supposed to end the run? Simple: Pause the game and going back to the main menu. Yeah, quitting the game is the only way to effectively end the run. That was pathetic.
If you're tired of seeing blue, don't worry,
this game will make you get sick of it.
Graphically tries its best on looking nice since the sprites are quite well made, but they suffer of overpixelation most of the times, and as the enemies increase in size, the overpixelation grows too, being the Megalodon the major offender in this game. Also, the game only has one constant thing: Blue filters. 3 different tones of blue over the sprites to give the allusion of an underwater environment instead of adding detail to the floor for a good seabed background. Resulting in a monotonous, boring and even irritating visual experience that will make players get tired of it before completing the 20 minutes this game asks you to survive. While the main menu music is quite catchy and beach club-like, the in-game dull "underwater"-like soundtrack is just repetitive and boring.
Ending this shit is the best option indeed.
Ugh. Marine Survivors is a great example of how NOT to do an arena shmup. Sluggish ship, horrible controls, overcrowded with absurd amounts of enemies, die once and its game over, boring in-game music. If you hated Raiden Nova, Marine Survivors will make you change your mind and prefer Raiden's twin stick shooter for hundreds of times. Starts as an unplayable shmup and after upgrading it becames "unloseable", forcing you to quit the game. An excellent example of how not make a shmup.
This time the catchy main menu music or the graphics are not gonna save it from the lowest score.
In score results, it gets the 1 R-9 out of 10 in the R-Scale:
Typical Eda Scale result.
Why I'm not surprised of seeing this?
Sadly, our journey into videoshit is far from done...
Next Trashstorm: The horror will go neon in Space KaBaam Neon.