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Varia Metal |
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This is a pretty obscure vertical shooter that has very little to recommend it. It's supposedly from 1995, but looks and plays like it was made in the 1980's.
KLOV lists this game as "Very Rare." That's probably 'cause nobody wants it. This is probably going to be a short review, since the game seems so determined to marinate in mediocrity, but I'll give it a shot anyway.
Three buttons - one for shot, one for bomb, and one that, interestingly, morphs your ship into an entirely different craft, with different weapons. Refrain from shooting for a while, and your weapon powers up until you either fire it at an enemy or get sick of the incessant "Maximum Level" beep and fire it at the air.
Presentation goes with a complete lack of effort in any department. The music is a five-second loop, the level design is the most bog-standard of farmlands and nondescript metallic gunk, explosions are pathetic. It's as though adding a third button and a morph ability excused the designers from any other attempts at originality.
The first level was merely bad. In the second level, the real, unforgivable design mistakes come into play - enemy ships come from the bottom of the screen, you can't shoot while your new-life shields are up (what?!), the enemy tends to fire all at once which results in really patchy gameplay - ugh.
Don't get me wrong, I've played worse. In order to find the good stuff, you've got to play some God-awful crap, unless you read retroreviews.net anyway. But this game is like an ice-cream cone with nothing inside. A quarter-assed disappointment.
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