Scaling and Review Notes

Personal Hours Played: 5.0

Review Disclaimer

Every game ranked was played, but also scaled based on research, talking to developers & your feedback. The priority with the scale's initial design was to compare similarity on relatively objective features - so it doesn't claim to include reviews of the depth and clarity you'd get at a games journalism site, nor the intensive time played you might get from player reviews on steam. We try to incorporate and link all of that along with a 'review scale' that checks for bugs. See the heatmap and breakdown! Time played noted so you can take any notes with a big grain of salt! I can't get to high level gameplay in 850+ games so I heavily research every game. Over 80 game creators let me interview or survey them! I Hope to go back and refine. Please argue or submit your own scores and reviews to be incorporated with credit into the notes and score numbers.

Added or last checked on 11/4/2023

An incredibly satisfying and easy to loop into space survivors-like. The controls remind me of playing the drifty UFO style Arilou in Star Control 2, where you'll keep moving a little bit but it's never annoying because you can zip right back around. It's got what I'd say are bullet hell hitboxes (in the best way) where you can cruise quite close to an enemy and still save your neck at the last second.

That's good because it's honestly also very challenging due to the fast movement and generally only 3 or 4 health you've got, with few ways to make yourself more resistant to a hit.

Feels a little slow to unlock things, but also the minimal menu design makes it easy to forget there are also challenge based unlocks and not just the currency ones. Once I got in the habit of finding a challenge to chase I was fully sucked into the "one more run" loop.

It adds a dash but besides that it's mostly an auto shooter. While most space games (and most survivors-likes in general it seems) add twin stick controls, this one happily handles the aiming all on its own. I love that there's a no dashing challenge because I hate dashing.

It's technically an arena shooter but an enjoyable parallax scroll effect and the zippy travel makes it seem like you're in the endless void and not a tiny box, so it doesn't get negative scores in the map size and exploration, even a tiny positive in "big" maps. When you finish the survival/boss mode it just kills you with spawns VS style, but if you make an invincible build it's possible to continue until you break the game. We'll call this full points for both.

Really really good menu music. Great music overall. Like if star control was scored by trent reznor. Accidentally left it paused for a half hour just enjoying it on my phone. Game is considered complete with no updates planned, dev is working now on Bore Blasters, also on this spreadsheet.

Scaling and Review Notes

Review Disclaimer

Every game ranked was played, but also scaled based on research, talking to developers & your feedback. The priority with the scale's initial design was to compare similarity on relatively objective features - so it doesn't claim to include reviews of the depth and clarity you'd get at a games journalism site, nor the intensive time played you might get from player reviews on steam. We try to incorporate and link all of that along with a 'review scale' that checks for bugs. See the heatmap and breakdown! Time played noted so you can take any notes with a big grain of salt! I can't get to high level gameplay in 850+ games so I heavily research every game. Over 80 game creators let me interview or survey them! I Hope to go back and refine. Please argue or submit your own scores and reviews to be incorporated with credit into the notes and score numbers.

Added or last checked on 10/30/2023

Scale scoring from scorecard submitted by Developer. Once evaluated after a couple hours play and some research, will be adjusted and moved up into the ranking proper.

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