AstroAvenger Review

Written by: Dustin Arient Published: November 30, 2005 Imagine you're at the controls of a nimble, powerful starship. You've been on the trail of an intergalactic super villain whose crimes are without number. You've tracked him across three solar systems already and blasted countless squadrons of his loyal compatriots into space dust. Now, as you draw closer to his stronghold, he has issued a mammoth bounty on your head, swearing to terminate you at all costs. As you maneuver past swarms of asteroids, above the churning atmospheres of gas giants and the glowing plasma of solar flares, your enemies come again, placing their ships between you and their pirate admiral. That's a world of difference between the vaguely implied quests of 8-bit yore, in which the most detailed story you got was a directive to keep the alien hordes from reaching the bottom of the screen. Likewise, AstroAvenger updates the languishing genre of 2D space combat in order to bring it into the present generation of video games by adding 3D models, modern lighting effects and a number of strategy elements, balanced by wrist-cracking action. Is the sum of these parts a revolution, an evolution or a conniption? Read on. Graphics: The overall visual quality of AstroAvenger is its showpiece. In many ways, it's a stunning departure from the mediocre norm of the interstellar shoot-em-up genre. First, all of the objects on the screen, from the enemies to your fighter, and the various asteroids, space stations and missiles, are rendered in true 3D. The models are quite good, especially for their small size, and the texturing is almost uniformly excellent. The high point of this category is the extraordinary dynamic lighting. Every explosion and laser bolt paints the environs with shifting shadows and patches of illumination. Silhouettes are even cast onto the surfaces of the 3D backgrounds - which are themselves quite impressive, complete with planets, orbiting moons, nebulae and burning suns. On the downside, I would have enjoyed more variety in the enemy ship models. After you get about halfway through the game, you've seen almost all of them. Ease of use: AstroAvenger is extremely easy to play. You control your ship with the mouse, left-clicking to fire lasers, right-clicking to launch missiles and switching between main weapons with the number keys. One slight problem I encountered led me to believe the game contained no save feature. When you press the escape key in the middle of a level, you just get an option to go to the main menu. As it turns out, accepting will autosave for you, but there's no way to know that the first time you do it. During my initial run through the game, I wanted to change the volume of the music and sound, but didn't want to risk losing my progress. This issue is easily balanced by the user-friendly nature of the menus and the astoundingly useful in-game refresh rate override. The latter feature allows you to manually set the rate for any resolution, and should be included in every 3D game (though it is often omitted). Gameplay: AstroAvenger employs fast-paced action and some strategy elements to offer an involving arcade experience. Superficially, everything works just like Galaxian, 1942, Raiden or any other vertical scroller. You guide your spacecraft along the X and Y axes with the mouse or the keyboard and fire a variety of firearms as the game world rolls by. The experience is broken into the familiar format of stages, each filled with an increasingly deadly contingent of opposing fighters. If you can avoid their fire and destroy enough of them to get to the end of the level, you'll find yourself at a star base, where you're rewarded with the opportunity to exercise your strategic side. Each enemy killed earns you a bit of cash, which can be spent between missions on equipment and ammunition. Although there are occasionally pick-ups that can give you a new type of gun, you can't rely on them as you can in other games of this type. If you want to try out all the ordnance, you have to purchase it. Each of the various categories of blaster (some fire in a straight line, some in branching patterns, others seek out their targets) can be upgraded several times. The catch is that higher degrees of power draw greater amounts of energy from your batteries. If you run out of juice during a fight, your rate of fire slows to a trickle. This can be offset by purchasing larger generators for your vessel, but these are quite pricey. You're left with a number of decisions to make. Do you spend your money on a new cannon, do you save up and get the energy boost first, or do you stockpile missiles and upgrade your shields? Difficulty: There are some severe shortcomings in this area. Of the three settings - Cadet, Pilot and Ace, in order of increasing difficulty - Cadet can be dismissed immediately, even as a point of discussion. It's far too easy, to the point that it wouldn't be worth anybody's time to play. Pilot level is the only setting on which I have completed all the missions, but I encountered a couple of confusing issues. For about the first one-third of the game, it varies from quite demanding to almost impossible to squeak through a level without dying a couple of times. However, as soon as you upgrade your armor, generator and the fourth-tier laser to a reasonable degree, you can wave goodbye to all the challenging and stimulating aspects of the game. I coasted through the last three worlds, thinking, "When am I going to get to the final boss, so I can use all these nukes I've been saving up?" I was able to finish the second half so quickly, my total time to completion was an incredibly short two hours. This wouldn't be so bad if the hardest setting wasn't impossible to play. The screen gets crammed full of enemies, all of which are tougher and fire at no less than twice the rate of those I'd been accustomed to. I couldn't even get past the first stage without losing a life or two. Sound effects: The sound effects in AstroAvenger are as varied as they are deep - and they're as deep as a puddle. There are a few run-of-the-mill explosions and some laser bleeps that vary slightly from weapon to weapon, but that’s it. In heavy firefights, everything blends together into a cacophony that drowns out the far superior music. I found it best to turn the FX almost all the way down. Music: AstroAvenger's music consists of a collection of upbeat techno tracks, which are pleasantly atmospheric and appropriate to the setting and mood of the game. My one complaint is that the songs are too few in number (less than a half-dozen in all). This is a shame, since they get better as you progress through the stages. Final analysis: Any vertically scrolling space shooter made after 1992 has to walk a technical and philosophical tightrope. Depart too far from the conventions of its coin-op roots, and the nostalgic old-school crowd will stay away; fail to update graphics and gameplay in a significant way, and no one will have any reason to play a retread of a classic when they can download an emulator or purchase an "Arcade's Greatest Hits" pack. AstroAvenger succeeds in walking this line in some areas, but ultimately, its reach exceeds its grasp. The graphics are about as good as a Galaga clone's should ever need to be. The effects and models are outstanding, but absent are the wide variation of enemy types and pilotable spacecraft that could have been included. Some strategy elements have been added to the mix, but problems with difficulty levels and a botched attempt to inject a back-story (via barely coherent paragraphs shown between levels) detract from the experience. Done right, this might have given a grandiose, though tongue-in-cheek, context to this shoot-em-up, but in the end, AstroAvenger's storyline is an unoriginal yarn sieved through an obviously un-surmounted language barrier.