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