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Andro Dunos (Evercade): COMPLETED!

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I’m not really a big fan of side-scrolling shooters. I’ve probably lamented this before, numerous times. Still, unfathomably, I find myself playing them sometimes when they appear on Evercade cartridges or retro game compilations. Hence Andro Dunos, here.

No, I’d never heard of it either. And it seems for good reason, as it’s almost entirely forgettable. It does some R-Type things and it does some Gradius things and it has most of the things needed of a shooter in order to be playable (like no slowdown and some avoidable enemy patterns and so on), plus it’s an coin-op so you can just feed it virtual pennies until the cows come home and/or you’ve completed it.

Which I did, but as I said – entirely forgettable.

Denshattack: chugga chugga

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The bright colours caught my eye, and since I was stuck at some hunters in a room on the way to the Silent Cartographer, I thought I’d give it a go. I’m glad I did. Denshattack bombards you quickly with different controls, and it’s an assault on your concentration for the first few levels as you battle to remember to grind around corners, jump ahead of blockages, and find routes to the collectibles. However, as soon as I realised that it’s an experience meant to be repeated, with you working out the best places to perform stunts and where there are quick switches between rails, then it turns into a much calmer experience; the first one or two runs through a level are there for research, before then trying to nail a proper run.

In Denshattack, you control a train which can jump between the rails (both double and single) which have, for some reason, been installed around large areas of Japan. You do stunts as you jump, choose which route to go down, and explore varied locales including the inside of a volcano, a factory, and a mountain. At one point I jumped on a Ferris wheel and rolled it down a hill, knocking over satellite dishes and rolling through the bay.

It feels like a Dreamcast game, with colours, very solid-feeling worlds, high score chasing, multiple objectives, and short levels. But it builds on the last twenty-five years of game design, pulling in everything that makes gaming more accessible nowadays.

There is a story. Someone who takes photos told my character about denshattack, and as a train operator she decided to become the best. There’s someone who I am travelling to see in order to challenge her, but on the way there are others to beat. I’m sure there’s more nuance to it than that, but I missed it.

Burnout Legends: without the legends

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Or, indeed, any other traffic. Burnout Legends on the DS is quite impressive given its age, but it doesn’t feel like a Burnout game; it’s pedestrian, there’s little danger or threat, it’s really difficult to actually cause a crash, and the digital steering means the cars feel almost identical to each other. You can build up boost by driving on the wrong side of the road with basically no concern that you might meet something coming the other way; if another car does appear you have the same chance to avoid it as if you were driving on the right side anyway. I can’t make the car drift around corners, but it doesn’t really matter since you don’t lose much speed by scraping along the walls.

I don’t think I’ll be dedicating the time needed to unlock everything. Or, indeed, anything.

Pizza Hero (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Surprisingly, this isn’t called Pizza Survivors. Because it seems that most Survivors-type games explain to you their genre by including that word in the title. But now you know, you can guess the rest of the game for yourself, no?

If you can’t, then let me explain. It’s Vampire Survivors only you’re a pizza slice and your weapons are all pizza topping related analogues to those weapons in Vampire Survivors. So you have the gun type ones and the rotating around you ones and the random areas of damage generating ones. You’d expect the enemies to be hotdogs and chips and stuff but no, they’re mostly dragons and tenacle monsters and skeletons. Why? Who knows.

Nonsensical graphics and theming aside, it’s fine. To be honest, so long as you get the balance right it’s pretty hard to “do” a terrible survivors clone, and so Pizza Hero is, well, fine. It does nothing new but doesn’t break anything either, so that’s a net positive. Probably.

Loot Loop (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Loot Loop, bought only because it was bundled with Gambler’s Table which I already own so it was cheap on the Steam Store, is an incremental auto-battler side scrolling RPG. In some ways, it is a bit like Idle Slayer, but it’s much shorter and much more fun. And by much shorter, I mean, it lasted a couple of days play instead of about six months.

The aim is to walk right, fight baddies, beat the boss at the end of the level, and then do the next level. Of course, being an incremental game, you get laughably nowhere to start with because your weapon is awful and your HP survives maybe one hit. But, each defeated foe nets you currency and you can use that to upgrade your stats, and eventually buy extra characters for your party, magic spells, and various other buffs and skills.

Soon you can best an entire level without even seeing your health bar change, but naturally the next level essentially resets your power as everything is exponentially harder. Loot Loop doesn’t really push the genre (and it certainly seems to be a genre at this point, just look at what I’ve played this year) but it’s fine.