Two Fedoras

In the early 1990′s it was the creation of “bullet hell” that was meant to impress players with lots of shiny sparkly bullets on the screen in often beautiful arrangements and highly complicated patterns. Well yesterday the player got the multiplicity treatment in developer Mommy’s Best Games’ Shoot 1UP.

Gameplay

Shoot 1UP is a traditional shooter with one major difference, rather than having one ship at a time, the game gives you control over up to 30 ships at once. The ships move together in a phalanx of variable size. The phalanx formation is  expanded or contracted by using the triggers. When the ships are spread adequately far appart you gain access to the serious pew pew. However in doing so you have leveraged your ability to avoid the barrage of missiles. This forces you to play strategically and pick the proper formation for various situations.

You begin the normal modes of the game with 3 ships and quickly proceed to add ships as you destroy enemies and collect  the titular 1UP items. As you gain ships in your phalanx you gain new power as the ships synergies with one another. Additionally you begin to also fire in multiple directions, first in all the primary, forward, backward, left, and right, and then in the secondary angular directions.

In addition to the super weapon and the multidirectional firing, your ship count also effects another mechanic, the shield, which is built up any time you stop firing. The beauty of the sheild is that when you begin firing again it explodes and destroys all projectiles and any enemies who find themselves in the blast radius.

Included in Shoot 1UP is a mode of play  referred to as “Score Trek”. This mode plays like a classic shoot’m up giving you only one ship that levels up as you collect 1UP’s. The interesting idea here though is that your progress is saved at each stage and you can carry on beating all the stages in that way. Once you have finished them all you can then play through again at a harder difficulty with the same ship, it sort of behaves like an RPG element. You can do this over and over again. I have no idea how high it goes, because honestly I am horrendous at shooters and die really fast.

Speaking of my debilitating shooter ineptitudes, one of the nice bits of Shoot 1UP is the difficulty levels; Chilled, Normal, and Serious. In fact, chilled is so chilled even I was able to play through it! This really opens the game up to both hardcore shoot’m up folk and the rest of us.

As far as bugs, the only real issue I experienced in my play throughs of the game was some slowdowns in frame rates during hectic sequences. Which as you can imagine is kind of a dangerous thing to have happen in a bullet hell, but  I don’t think I ever died as a result of it.

Audio Visual

Visually Shoot 1UP is pretty well done and is the equal of many popular shooters of yesteryear. The ships and critters look good and the bosses are gynormous and intimidating, especially the one with the boob canons. I’m not even sure I wan’t to know what the aliens are planning to do with enormous boob canon weilding women.

I actually found myself distracted on nearly every stage, some more than others, by the backgrounds as you can see this ruined wasteland scrolling below you. You cant help but want to look at what all’s been going on down there.

The bullet patterns when you have a big phalanx going and start occupying a sizable portion of the screen when in various formations. The Ovoid ship in particular is visually impressive with its larger projectile sizes. That said it isn’t the most impressive bullet hell display of ridiculousness you’ll ever see.

The audio is pretty good, it has a great retro sound that matches the games visuals. While it was in this retro style you could definitely feel that it was modern much in the way the graphics were retro but had modern effects and crispness to them. Not a bad soundtrack at all.

Summary

Probably the best dollar you will spend today. It’s available now on Microsoft Indie Marketplace for 80 Microsoft points.