Your ship’s busted and you’ve been forced to make an emergency landing on an alien planet that seems to be in the midst of an emergency of its own. Armed with only your wits and a gun, you must gather up all the parts you need to fix your ship and get the hell out of Dodge. This is Dysnomia, the lates twin-stick shooter from independent developer Team Mango available now on XBLIG.

Story

Dysnomia’s main overarching plot is served up in a traditional opening sequence. This sequence explains that your ship is on the blink and you’ve located an outpost nearby where you may effect repairs. However, this isn’t necessarily the real story the game seeks to tell. Instead, Dysnomia’s real intent is to explore the events that have unfolded on the planet prior to your arrival. Unfortunately, everyone that could have simply explained to you what kind of crazy shit had gone down is either dead or missing and all that’s left are creepy crawlies and message terminals.

The terminals are located throughout the game and contain email correspondences between the personnel stationed at the outpost. The use of emails as the plot delivery method creates a player experience that can best be described as a narrative jigsaw puzzle. This is a result of the game’s fairly non-linear structure and can be explored through a variety of different paths. That isn’t to say the game’s story is necessarily in flux, just that the bits and pieces aren’t disseminated as part of any sort of fixed sequentiality.

In addition to the piecemeal style of story telling, the emails also had a humanizing effect on the events. In typical email fashion, thier are senders and receivers of all the messages in the game. This creates a situation where you can approach a terminal and read through the personal emails on it, and then fight through half the game and come across another terminal that happened to be the sender or receiver of the original terminal’s messages. I’m not really sure why, but this little touch somehow manages to add weight to the messages. Perhaps because it implies a certain level of community that existed before the disaster.

Gameplay

As a twin-stick shmup, Dysnomia controls much how you’d expect with a couple of variations on the typical. Firstly, the right trigger is used begin firing, rather than simply automating the firing based on the right stick’s orientation. Secondly, the other buttons are used to pick up, activate/deactivate, and insert/remove main boards.

The objectives of Dysnomia is to find the various parts needed to relaunch your ship as well as investigating the happenings of the mining colony. The item hunt and the investigation go hand in hand since the bulk of the items needed can be collected from the message terminals themselves. The remainder of the items are found on bosses or laying about on the ground where you’ll also find health packs and weapon items.

Speaking of weapons, a shmup with only one gun would be boring. Thankfully Dysnomia has five firing modes that are made available by picking up unique power cells. Once obtained you can easily switch between the various firing modes by using the shoulder buttons. There is, however, a bit of a balance issue with the five modes, as once you receive the explosive shots you really don’t want to use any of the others outside of situations where ammo is at a premium, for example during boss fights.

On the topic of bosses, there are several scattered throughout the game. The bosses are not necessarily essential to progressing through the levels, but are required to complete the game. What this means, is that you can fight the bosses in any order you want. The difficulty of the bosses is a bit wonky, as the only two that present any real challenge is the second and final encounters — which I am almost convinced is the head and ass of the same boss. All the other bosses can quite literally be kited around their chambers and shot to death with little to no risk of death.

Death in Dysnomia isn’t too big of a deal. The game allows you to save any time you wish and will auto save any time you load a level. This keeps frustration to a minimum on some of the more challenging swarm sections, unless of course you screw up and save your progress in a bad place. At which point you could be seriously boned. If you find the game lacking in difficulty, there are four difficulty settings that appear to throttle the spawn rate of the creatures. I found that the hard mode’s pacing gave me a good sense of really tearing things up.

Really the gameplay is very solid. The controls are nice and tight and I experienced no crashes during my play through. I did, however, encounter one annoying issue that involved the audio bugging out on bosses that fire lasers. The laser sound effect would get stuck and play continuously until it eventually irritated me enough to restart the game.

Audio Visual

Dysnomia’s graphics are quite nice for an XBLIG offering. The environments are well developed and filled with an endless supply of creepy crawlies  that are both creepy and crawly. The creatures come in numerous shapes and sizes and are spread throughout the various levels with only the most basic models being reused. My personal favorites are the security droids who are basically laser wielding Roombas. Honestly, they could have only been better if cats had been riding them.

The menus and dialogue windows containing the email information are all well designed and easily read. The title screen is especially nice with its view of the planet and a window showing a bit of a gameplay preview.

On the audio front Dysnomia is adequate. Its music is definitely good but I found its sound effects to be a little lacking. The little clicks of the spider like alien’s walking down the hall is certainly creepy sounding over the low key game music, but they could have taken it all a little further.

I think with a little more emphasis  on dynamic effects,  the game could have created an atmosphere that really got you going.  For example, the game’s atmosphere could have taken a turn for the creepy if the sounds of the spider’s tapping feet grew louder as they approached or if the game’s ambient lighting had been turned down putting more of an emphasis on the mining colonies emergency lighting. But these are really minor things that I only suggest because I love.

Summary

Dysnomia features two player co-op, about five hours of play time, and four difficulty modes that can be adjusted on the fly. I really enjoyed my play through of the game and think fans of twin stick shooters should certainly check it out for 240 Microsoft Points on the XBLIG Marketplace.

Summary