Developer: Cipher Prime
Publisher: Cipher Prime
Platform: Windows, OS X
Intake – Review
Flashing colors, fast clicking and fast reaction speeds. No, this game is not for the epileptic! Intake is a futuristic arcade shooter that will ruin your mouse and test your patience as you battle your way through endless numbers of pills.
Story
This is an arcade game, so no story is to be found and it is not needed at all! You are directly thrown into the game and start clicking pills, it’s very straightforward.
Graphics
The graphics are very vivid and colorful, the pills come in pairs of 2 colors. Each time you pass a level, you get a new pair of colors. You can also buy new color pairs in the drugstore (shop).
The graphic options have almost no customizing possibilities, only a V-sync option, change of resolution, a windowed mode and a colorblind mode.
There is however a slight bug with the windowed mode. I use a dual monitor layout, and when I start the game in windowed mode, it opens the game on both monitors, half on my first monitor and half on the other. However, this is easily fixed by dragging the window to one screen.
It’s kind of disappointing that you cannot rescale the windowed mode, my second screen is smaller than my primary screen, so I cannot play the game on my second screen.
Sound
According to the website, there are “infinite wubs”. This might sound tempting, but don’t be mistaken, the game only has 3 soundtracks, which is very disappointing. You start out with only 1 soundtrack, later in the game you can spend your hard earned mg (currency) on extra tracks, but in total there are only 3.
As with all arcade games, the sound effects are very simple, yet fitting. There are lasers, explosions, clicking sounds, you name it! All the sounds effects were carefully picked to make them fit together perfectly.
Gameplay
The point of the whole game is to click pills and collect mg, which you can then spend in the drugstore for useful and less useful upgrades. You can buy bigger explosions, more lives, supersized pills, invincibility and so on. You can even buy an upgrade to turn your game into a SHUMP (Shoot ’em Up).
When the game starts you get an instruction menu with the controls, which are pretty straightforward and also customizable before you start the game. You left click to shoot pills and right click or press spacebar to change the color of your cursor. As said before, the pills come in color pairs. When you have blue and yellow pills, you can swap your cursor to those colors and click the pills with the corresponding color. If you do this right and don’t miss click, you get a combo to boost your score.
From level 25 and on, grey pills start appearing. If you click them you will be flash banged, so I advise to not click them! Also from level 25 and on there are challenges, once every few levels a challenge will start. Pills can come falling down with great speed, your screen can be flooded with pills and more!
When you let too many pills through, you will take an overdose and lose one life, when you lose all your lives, you can play a bonus level. Here you can click pills to get extra mg to spend in the store.
There are checkpoints at level 25, 50 and 75. Once you get to those levels, you have the option to start at that level in future games, but you can still change this in the progression menu. Achievements also are included, for example: “Kill 3 pills in 0,3 seconds or less”. There is even an achievement to beat one of the developers his high score (which I did with 26 million more!).
I did however find a small bug in the achievements. There is one achievement “Play 1000 games” that seems to reset its counter every time I restart the game. I literally played over 500 games and now the counter is back to 3.
Conclusion
Intake is the perfect game if you need to kill some time. I played it for about 10 hours and finished the game. There are however many achievements I didn’t complete yet. The graphics are ok and the sound effects are fun, but having only 3 soundtracks in a futuristic arcade game is a big no! Even though the music can get quite annoying at times, the game is still great fun and very addictive. I was most impressed by the SHUMP upgrade: “it’s like a whole new game!”. The thing that would finish the game for me is the ability to import my own music so I can use my own upbeat music to enjoy the game.
Intake - Review,
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