Developer: Siter Skain
Publisher: Nyu Media
Platform: PC
RefleX – Review
Remember the good old arcade games? Top down shooting, trying to avoid hundreds of bullets on your screen. Yes, it was a bullet hell! These kind of games will always stay popular if they are put into the right hands. RefleX is one of those games, it might not have the best story but hell, who cares about story in these kind of games?
Story
Humans have resettled on Earth after a big disaster. The world’s nations have formed a unified economy and a global militaristic government. However, in reaction to this worldwide mass oppression, a resistance organization called Valkyness arose. After decades of conflict between the Global Unified Army and Valkyness, suddenly an alien force arrives to seek revenge for what earth has done against their people! This war almost reduces the entire planet to scorched earth and brings mankind close to extinction!
Graphics
The graphics in RefleX aren’t the greatest, but they are quite enjoyable. Opposed to most games of today, the graphics aren’t super-duper realistic. This isn’t a bad thing, because it keeps this game in line with other great old school arcade shooters. However, RefleX does something a lot of other top down shooters don’t do: the background is dynamic. This includes elevators with aliens rising up and the background might also occasionally shift positions in order to transition to the next level.
Sound
The music in RefleX is simply amazing. Every level has its own sound track and it fits with that level perfectly. You’ll go from peaceful music in the first level to over the top high energy tracks in the next one. You immediately feel at home and start to familiarize yourself with the fast gameplay and sprays of bullets!
Sound effects are also pretty good, they have a very old school feel: from the typical lasers to the typical explosions. All this combined helps to make this game a very fun experience.
Gameplay
In RefleX, you play as a spaceship that is already fully equipped, there are no power-ups to be collected and there is nothing to unlock. Just pure firepower! This firepower is combined with a reflection shield. Yes you heard it correctly, reflection. It won’t just protect you from the enemies their attacks, but it will reflect most attacks. If you combine and time this correctly, it’s pretty easy to take down a big enemy by just turning defense into offense. But be careful though! The shield has power, using it too much will prevent usage for a while, and using the shield for a long time will also reduce your firepower! This way, you can’t just keep your shield up at all times and get away with it. You’ll have to find the right balance between offense and defense.
Each time you kill an enemy, you’ll get score. This is the score for killing that enemy multiplied by a modifier. This modifier will go up each time you kill a certain amount of enemies without getting hit, so not getting hit is key! Each time you get hit you will lose some durability, when you drain all your durability, you will die.
If you’re not familiar with these kinds of games, you will die a lot. When starting the game, you’ll notice your amount of continues or “souls” are very low. You’ll have to replay from level 1 a lot of times. Every time you get the game over screen though, you get an extra continue for future playthroughs. This encourages the player to keep getting further and further, all the way up to stage 8: the final stage! Each stage also features bosses, which will require clever tricks and movements in order to kill them.
Aside from playing all the way from level 1 again, you can select a level. If you complete level 1 here, you can quit and start at level 2 next time. The downside to this is that you won’t keep your score. Instead of keeping your score from previous levels, you start from 0 again. Which isn’t really good if you’re trying to make it inside the leaderboards.
Conclusion
Overall, this is a very solid game that will be extremely popular with gamers that like top down arcade shooters. It’s a game where focus is everything, if you don’t focus, you will definitely get burned. When you first glance at the game, you’ll think “old school”, but here and there some elements that distinguish it from just a typical old school game.
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