SMASHED IN SPACE
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.
Remember what I said on my review of Space War Infinity?, "I wouldn't be surprised if Space Smash appears later, but only time will tell". Just as I expected, it happened.
Space Smash made its way on the XBOX Series X after the release of Space War Infinity.
The initial choice: Pick the only ship available, buy the rest later.
The first thing we need to do in this game is to select your ship. Each one has different statuses.
LIFE (Heart): This indicates how much life your ship has before going down.
BOMB CAPACITY (Bomb): Like in Aero Fighters 3, each ship has its own carrying capacity for bombs.
SPEED (Three ">"s): This one indicates how fast or slow the selected ship is.
SHOT (Sight): Indicates which how many bullets your shots have. For example "2" implies they're Twin Shot equipped.
At first you can only choose your default ship, and you have to get coins in order to unlock newer ones with unique features and levels of tolerance; from slow but heavy equipped ships, to fast but brittle ones (having a ship with 1 hitpoint is absurdely hard).
There's two ways to get out: Shot down or crushed
¿Which one will be your demise?
Onto the gameplay. The premise of Space Smash is a basic arena twin stick shooter where at first, the idea is to reach the highest score and reach the top of the leaderboards. To reach those scores, it utilizes a combo indicator that climbs non-stop reaching the hundreds, but as it climbs, the time and rate of decrease in-between enemy kills will increase. So, expect a fast drop of 513 to 321 in seconds. Fortunately, you have a good assortment of weapons from Grenade Launchers (shot that splits in 8 bullets), Machine Guns, Missile Launchers that explode with a blast radius, Shotguns (Spread shots) and Lasers, along with additional power ups like the Mirror (Tailgun), Magnets and multipliers for Orbs and Combos.
But you also have one more weapon: Bombs. Using a bomb will unleash a pulse of bullets that will kill everyone on screen and destroy all their projectiles. Despite its devastating power, you'll have to learn when to use it. Why? First, the bomb items doesn't appear too often due to the random item drop and second is the bomb capacity of your ship. So you'll have to burn one bomb when a Bomb item appears since this game lacks of the "Bonus if the stock's full" unlike most shmups. All of your weapons have limited ammunition as well, so this requires careful shooting more than recklesness in order to stay alive. The game will throw you homing enemies, the "I split in multiple and smaller enemies" type of ship and enemies that shoot in all directions. While all the weapons are effective, the flamethrower is the worst of all. The reason of this is because the flame doesn't go on the direction your ship is aiming while firing (think the Flamethrower in Contra III for example), instead when you move, the spray goes on the opposite direction, requiring to stand still while firing it.
Getting overwhelmed by enemies is one thing, but the real enemy in Space Smash is the screen. As you're pitted in 360° combat, the walls on the sides will be closing slowly, trying to crush everything in the AO (Area of Operations). Do you always wanted to know what Luke Skywalker and his friends felt in the Death Star trash compactor? And later adapt this idea in a shmup? Well, this is the game for you. But here's the good news. Each enemy defeated drops a blue droplet known as "Orb". Each Orb obtained pushes the walls back a bit. This is why having lots of enemies later on is heavily required and keeping the bomb stock with at least 1 or 2 bombs is a must so you can pick tons of Orbs and push them all the way back, Dying once is Game Over and your score will be on the leaderboards. Unfortunately, you have no idea of who's the 1st place and how many points had. No imbecile gave you the option of scrolling up or down except when you're playing the game for the very first time before your first "Personal High Score" is saved, and being honest, reaching more than 80 million points is easier to say than do unless you don't have nothing else to play.
It's a battle where you delay the inevitable.
To finish the gameplay aspect, let's talk about the achievement progression in XBOX. In a single session of two playthroughs I've got 21 of the 27 achievements. That's pathetic. It will require a couple of sessions to obtain everything. Unless you have sleeping disorders and you're after an Achievement Hunt, then you will be clearing everything in one session.
Graphically, is laziness in action. The ships lack of detail as they look like cheap paper cutouts from a cheap flash game with the oh-so-common starry background since the game takes place in space. No planets to break the monothony, making it even more boring. The music is the basic electronic-ambient-pseudo synth-chiptune like series of generic tunes that aren't bad, but not memorable as well, as if the developers composed them just to complete the product.
SPACE SMASHED FUN-FACTS
- The "Ping" sound on the Rising Moon Games logo might be a reference to Nintendo's "Mario coin" sound in the start-up of some of their games like Super Mario World or the Gameboy's bootup (Rupee sound in The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past).
- While the ship select claims that Tank is a Twin Shot-Type ship it actually is a single one.
Sums up what I think of shit grade shovelware shmups.
The addition of Shovelware shmups continues as Space Smash turns out to be another addition to the BPGAF (Buy, Play, Get the Achievements and Forget) type of games.
I thought the XBOX store rule changes would get rid of these "Easy to get" type of games, but it looks like they're doing little to nothing efforts.
So, anyway. Space Smash gets 3 R-9's out of 10:
