Reviewed by Geir Gunnarsson.
As a fan of twin-stick shooters I got a little excited when I heard about this game. I booted up the game and was pleasantly surprised regarding the art style. The game is made to look like those early time arcade machines, all cogs and sprockets and rails. The playable character is a puppet on a stick and moves around on these rails, meaning movement is quite limited. As long as there is a rail you can move, if you run out you can’t dodge enemies or their bullets. Everything looks like a very early arcade machine and it is beautiful, the graphics aren’t that great but the art style is.
You start each level with your standard gun with limited ammo, along the way there are checkpoints for various functions i.e. ammo, health and saves. Ammo checkpoints refills ammo as health checkpoints do for health while the save checkpoint respawns you when you die.
Everything seems to be destructible and you will see the degradation of the models when they get shot. Even the enemies and the character model will show damage the more they get hurt. They will have dents and bullet holes with the occasional electric spark until they fall apart when they or you die. It is a very nice touch since everything is supposed to be made from tin.
You kill enemies, they drop cash that you need to pick up quickly before it despawns and it despawns way too quickly in my opinion. At the beginning of every level you get the chance to spend your hard-earned cash on weapons and clothing. The clothing does have gameplay bonuses, for example the earliest hat you can buy increases how fast you can shoot. There are many different types of enemies, there are the classic rushing you enemies and various shooting type enemies i.e. rapid firing and single shot.
As for the gameplay it is not the best twin-stick shooter mainly because of the rails. It can be hard to dodge bullets and enemies since they also use the same rails and everyone is limited in their movements because of that. You tend to overshoot rail intersections and missing turns while the computer has no such issues. You do have a deflect button but sometimes that is not enough because of the sheer number of bullets heading your way. The camera angle does not help either, being sort of isometric most of the time and changing to either top down or straight behind the character for some fights and bosses it can be hard to aim properly, especially in those scenes where the camera changes to right behind you it can be difficult to hit enemies on the same rail as you since in that instance you are supposed to shoot forward and not to the sides.
When the camera changes to top down view you’d think it would improve but it is exactly then that you experience how limited the rail system is and you barely manage to dodge anything at all.
There are many things to praise regarding this game: art style, sounds, music and the story is serviceable but unfortunately the limitations of the rails create more frustration than enjoyment. I could see how you would think it would create a more tactical approach but, in my experience, it was more annoying than fun.
In conclusion get this if you love twin-stick shooters, otherwise wait until it's on a sale.
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