Got it on a whim after stumbling across some reviews on it and it's a surprisingly fresh take on the space shooter genre.

The story is the usual "Last Starfighter" cliche, but it's told in an awesome 80's cartoon style that feels reminiscent of Voltron/Transformers/Robotech and has great voice acting. It's also structured like a TV show, where each level is an episode, and the game is broken down into seasons, with five "episodes" a season.

The combat gameplay is where this really shines though. Your ship is extremely maneuverable, with the shoulder buttons assigned to thrusters, boost and strafing. There's a learning curve to get comfortable with movement, but once you do it's extremely gratifying to leverage it in combat. The action style is closer to the arcade Asteroids, where you're in the center and shit comes flying at you from all angles (vs the usual SHMUPS where you face a single direction). But instead of mindlessly shooting endless waves of enemies, you need to be tactical in how you take on enemies. Your thrusters create noise (boost and shooting even more so), probes escape to get reinforcements and different factions will skirmish with each other (to your benefit), etc.

The best part though? After a certain point early in the game, your ship will be able to transform in a Voltron-like mech with a completely different combat style that you can switch to and from seamlessly. Instead of shooting enemies you wield a sword and can grapple objects and enemies (THROW 'EM IN THE LAVA). Once I was able to play with the mech, the game really clicked for me.

It's not for the faint of heart tho, it's a procedurally-generated game where you only get ONE life - if you die, you need to start the season over from the beginning. There are coins you can find that help you not start completely over from scratch, but if you're the type that button mashes and can get sloppy, maybe stay away. The game demands precision, not button mashing.

Really fun game overall though, definitely worth the $20 for me at least. Refreshing style of gameplay that I haven't seen too much of elsewhere. 82 on Metacritic, 90 on Polygon, 83 on IGN, 70 on Destructoid.


http://www.polygon.com/2015/8/5/9102179/galak-z-review-ps4

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/08/11/galak-z-review

http://www.destructoid.com/review-galak-z-the-dimensional-297236.phtml

i was disappointed it was slated as a PSN exclusive, but now i see its coming to PC so i'm copping day 1

i LOVE inertia based shooters. there's not a lot of them and they're usually arcady and not that deep like Luftrausers. so i'm actually pretty pumped to play something like this

>i LOVE inertia based shooters.

Yeah, that's exactly what this is. Terrifying when you're threading the needle between groups of enemies at one health trying to minimize thruster use to avoid notice and you end up drifting too far....

But yeah, what a great game. Missions are so stressful because the deeper you get into the season the more you have to lose if you die. But holy shit is it satisfying when you survive some of these encounters by the skin of your teeth. Even though there's not a ton of variety in terms of level design, the emergent combat and superior movement scheme really drive the game. I kinda wish this were a bigger budget version of this.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/300580/

I beat it but I'm still playing to get more blueprints and unlock more shit. The mechanics are incredibly satisfying, and I hope the game sells enough to warrant a sequel. Add more factions, more enemies, more variation in level design and it's an immediate day one purchase for me.

And what I played was fantastic.

And I've been waiting for this game forever.

I don't know why it's on the backburner, thoooo. I'm such a buster.