Astervoid 2000 – Review
Follow Genre: Action, Casual, Indie
Developer: Mad Capacity , LREVG
Publisher: Mad Capacity, LREVG
Platforms: PC, Mac
Tested on: PC

Astervoid 2000 – Review

Site Score
9.0
Good: great soundtrack, online leaderboards
Bad: only local multiplayer
User Score
9.0
(2 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 9.0/10 (2 votes cast)

Astervoid 2000 is the latest game from indie developers Mad Capacity and LREVG. The game tries to blow new life into a classic game: Asteroids. Astervoid 2000 is a twin-stick space brawler which enhances the classic game with high-powered deathmatch and modern graphics. Kill your enemies on sight, or let your surroundings do it for you.

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Story

As Astervoid 2000 is a very simple space-brawling game, it doesn’t feature any kind of story. There is no dialog, cutscenes or any other kind of story element present in the game. Some people would think that’s a downside, but it really doesn’t matter all that much if you look at what kind of game this is. Astervoid 2000 obviously derives from the old Asteroids game, it’s hard to imagine a simple Asteroid game having a rich and coherent story.

Graphics

Astervoid 2000 is based on an old school game so it tries to carry over the old school feeling into its graphics. The graphics obviously aren’t the best out there, they feel rather retro and that’s not a bad thing at all. The background is quite modest and easy to overlook, since it’s very dark and doesn’t show a whole lot of stuff. That’s also a good thing because it doesn’t distract you from all of the action going on in the foreground. Graphical effects like explosions and laser shots look surprisingly good, and they fit together perfectly with the retro atmosphere of the game. Astervoid also runs very stable and doesn’t need a good PC at all to run.

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Sound

Sound wise, the game is doing very good. It features an awesome soundtrack with quite a few different songs for being such a small game. In total, there are a whopping 23 songs, which is more than some other big game titles out there. The music also fits perfectly with the game, giving a nice retro atmosphere. There are some sound effects in the game as well which are pretty good. They fit together well with the rest of the game and aren’t overwhelmingly loud or overpowering.

Gameplay

Like said before, Astervoid 2000 is a re-envisioning of the old-school Asteroids game from 1979, but now it’s a twin-stick survival deathmatch game. You can play the game both with gamepads or keyboard and mouse, and both combinations work great.

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Astervoid 2000 features two game modes, Survival and Versus. In Survival, you’re simply playing by yourself while trying to get the highest score on the leaderboards as you play against waves of bots. In this mode, you only have one life before it’s game over, so you’ll have to be agile to avoid all of the bullets or very accurate to destroy them by shooting into them. Your ship has a shield that can take one bullet and will regenerate after a couple of seconds, get hit while your shield is down and you’re done. The game also features multiple ships and factions you can join forces with. Before launching the mission, you can choose from a couple of different models and factions, which change the color of your ship. This is a nice way to stand out and allows a little bit of customization.

In the first wave, only one enemy that doesn’t shoot will spawn, but as you get further more and more enemies will appear and they will get more intelligent. As Astervoid 2000 doesn’t feature any upgrades or pickups in any way, you’ll have to rely on the powers that were given to you: a blaster and a booster. Your gun can be used in more than one way. You can tap your shoot button in order to fire small bolts that have a long range, or you can hold it to get bigger bolts with a shorter range. While you’re charging, you’ll move around slower so it’s dangerous to charge up a lot. However, a fully charged shot is a one-hit kill and will ignore the enemies’ shields and kill them instantly. Your boost can be used to move around faster, and if you’re charged up all the way you will thrust forward and damage enemies.

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Other than that, the single player doesn’t offer anything else besides the leaderboards which can be accessed after you die. You can then see how you measure up against players around the world. Besides single player, you can play local multiplayer with up to four friends in a deathmatch, first to 5 game.

Conclusion

Astervoid 2000 doesn’t have a lot of crazy features most modern games have, it’s simply a good old twin stick Asteroids shooter, which was made a bit more modern and turned into a family-friendly game. It’s very fun to play, requires quite a bit of skill and it has an awesome soundtrack. It makes for a perfect couch shooter for both singleplayer and local co-op with friends.

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 9.0/10 (2 votes cast)
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)
Astervoid 2000 - Review, 9.0 out of 10 based on 2 ratings

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