Something I really hate, is when developers play in on nostalgia or trends. It is not uncommon to find games being a shallow cash-grab, but when it gets plenty of good reviews while it should be easy to see that it is unfinished, I feel almost ashamed to be associated with them just because of the term “gamer”. I might sound terrible here and I am somewhat happy that other people can enjoy products that I can’t, but I wish one would take a step back, look at the entire picture, and be honest with themselves: is this really good? Why this long intro? Because I hate Super Star Path for these reasons.

“This is getting harder” NO IT IS JUST CHEAP!

What do you get when you combine Galaga and Columns? This vertical mess of a shooter.

In tight corridors, you have to shoot flying enemies coming towards you until the game tells you to fight a boss or if you lose a life. If there are enemies with the same colors aligned, shooting one of them will cause a chain-reaction. However, other colored enemies will turn to ice and can’t be destroyed. This could have been a strategic take on the shooter-genre, but the corridors are too tight, making navigating hard to do and since you have limited view, you can easily screw yourself over if you make a tiny mistake. These aren’t necessarily your faults either as the levels will be randomized from time to time, which can either mean you breeze through stages or rage quit due to poor design.

This also wants to be a roguelike game, with the possibility to pick up crystals from fallen aliens and buy new ships, so you can take a different approach each time you die. This could have been a neat idea as well, as the ships have unique elements to them, such as doubling picked up currency or have immunity to lasers. Unfortunately, they figured they should also add in RPG elements. You can also pick up 3 upgrades in each stage: power, movement and defense, which you can use to upgrade the ship of your choosing. However, you can only upgrade your ship in these three elements to a certain level, meaning you will have to buy a new ship, since they will be more powerful than the previous ship and possible to upgrade even higher. You can’t even buy better ships until you have finished certain stages. This is a terrible way of padding the game since you will have to buy new ships to make progress.

The stages aren’t much better, all being similar with only a new enemy-type or two, making the 6 stages incredibly repetitive. With tons of enemies on the screen, why can’t I have rapid-fire? If this all was much better designed, I suppose the strategy would have been more on when and which alien to shoot, but some enemies can take a lot of hits and I usually want to shoot more enemies before they turn into crystals. You have rapid-fire against bosses, so why must I turn this game into a literal button-masher until then?

The bosses are the only thing that come close to quality, as they can be insane bullet-hell fights and somewhat fun. They are similar to each other, but at least could give me a decent challenge. However, everything is based on luck and trying to combine a shooter, roguelike, puzzle game and RPG elements into one game, while clearly not having any idea on how to make them work, made this a total chore to play through.

Gameplay Score: 2/10

Been ages since 16-bits where this unappealing

Presentation is somewhat charming due to a lot of colors and even having parallax scrolling. But the stages are the same with barely any differences, repetitive enemies, similar bosses, and the backgrounds aren’t much better. Even the ships are a letdown in their designs. I did enjoy the music at least, since it made me pumped for the next fight, but they aren’t anything special. They do at least stay true to their 16-bit tone, despite the voice-acting, which is decent. Sound effects are good, but everything feels repetitive and there was really no creativity to anything here.

Presentation Score: 3.5/10

Invaders from space

You can get green medals by killing black enemies for a better ending and there is a boss-rush mode. They are not worth it, and simply there to give the game slightly more to do after the one hour playthrough. While the boss-fights were the best part, that is not saying much.

Extra Score: 2/10

Verdict

I had a headache after playing this. Combining 4 genres in an unimaginative space-shooter, is lazy. I don’t know if it could have worked, but I honestly, at this point, did not care. It is not worth anyone’s time and only an example of misusing concepts.  If anyone asked what I did expect when it only cost me 4 euros: I expected something worthwhile for my money. Go check out the Virtual Console instead for some good shooters.

25/100