Retro/Grade

[Noyb]

The demo for Retro/Grade is up on both Steam and the developer's website.

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For those who haven't been following the podcast, the game is a hybrid shmup-rhythm game. You're a space pilot being sent back through time through his previous battles, forced to catch your bullets and dodge enemy bullets to the beat in order to preserve the space time continuum.

My first impression was positive. It was surprisingly intuitive to split my brain to watch for my own bullets coming from the right and enemy bullets coming from the left. The combination of rhythm and shmup gameplay works.

The first few difficulty levels are fairly unchallenging, and the repetitiveness of the calm synth music makes the levels seem to drag on, which isn't a good sign in a rhythm game. On higher difficulties, though, the gameplay was pretty hectic and I found myself hanging on to that repetition to ground myself in the level, since even simple beats get more complicated when they're spread across lanes while you're being shot at from both sides. The second level was very difficult on "leet", which bodes well for the final game's difficulty curve. At that point, the shmup controls began feeling clunky, although I'm not sure whether that speaks more to my poor shmup skills or to a guitar controller being more appropriate for the highest levels.

The Sands of Time style rewind seems like a good fit. One of the more annoying parts in rhythm games is failing a good length of time into the song and having to repeat the entire easy introduction to reattempt the hard part. It is difficult to use in the middle of a song, since the later difficulties where you would actually need it do not offer many calm moments to resume playing.

[gdf]

Yeah, I tried this out a while back and enjoyed the shit out of the demo level.

When's the full game coming?

[elmuerte]

The game runs like shit on my system. Every few seconds it stutters, which makes it quite impossible to properly play it :/