Review: PixelJunk Shooter
I've been following the progress of a company known as Q Games for a while. Right now they're most well known for producing the "PixelJunk" series of games for the Playstation 3. Even though my Playstation 3 mostly serves as a giant paperweight these days, I've downloaded a few of their demos and been generally impressed. Q Games was founded by Dylan Cuthbert, who worked at Argonaut Software (developer of Star Fox for SNES) back in the day. It's cool to see someone aside from Shigeru Miyamoto stay relevant to the games industry for so long.
Anyway, like I said, Q Games is known for their PixelJunk brand, a collection of four (so far) inexpensive, downloadable titles for the PS3. Aside from the common PixelJunk name (great use of branding, by the way), these games have nothing in common. The first was a slot car racing game, the second was tower defense, and the third was a stylized platformer. The fourth, and most recent (not to mention my own most recent purchase) was PixelJunk Shooter.
As you can guess from the title, Shooter is, at its core, a shooting game. The player is tasked with rescuing miners and scientists who have been working to uncover resources under the surface of an unexplored planet. As you fly deeper and deeper underground, you encounter new and different obstacles. At first, these obstacles consist mostly of lava pits, which can be quenched by shooting through weak cave walls and finding water sources (getting too close to lava raises the heat level of your ship, which can be cooled by a dunk in some water). Further in, however, you come across ice, explosive gas, and a strange magnetic liquid that is attracted to your ship. The fluid dynamics are modeled in a very realistic fashion, and it's fun to watch the different materials interact. In addition, you can find various modifications for your ship: to allow it to shoot lava or water, or an "inverter" which allows your ship to enter lava, but water causes it to overheat. These different gameplay ideas inject a bit of puzzling into what would otherwise be a straightforward action game, and elevate it from being merely "good" to "great."
PixelJunk Shooter's length is just right. The game consists of three episodes that contain 5-6 stages. Each stage contains about four "sub-stages," smaller areas where you need to rescue all the survivors in order to proceed to the next. A stage will probably take you about 15 minutes to complete the first time. So, extrapolating, you'll get about 4 hours of unique gameplay for your $10. Each stage introduces new game concepts, and you barely get used to one you just learned before it's taken away and you have something entirely new to learn. The upshot is that the game feels very content-dense, yet each game concept is under-used so that you don't get tired of it. As far as bang for your buck goes, I can wholeheartedly recommend PixelJunk Shooter; the price is just about the same as going to a movie (my local theater charges $9), but it's twice as long and has much better content than any movie I've seen recently.
After playing PixelJunk Shooter (as well as a few other PixelJunk demos), I'm a Q Games convert. When I next have an afternoon or evening to kill, instead of plunking out cash for a movie, I'll be checking out a different entry into the PixelJunk series.
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