Developer: Rotten Mage
Publisher: Rotten Mage
Platforms: PC, Mac
Tested on: PC
Spacejacked – Review
Spacejacked is Rotten Mage’s latest game and proves to be an extremely fast-paced arcade tower-defense. It features turrets, alien scum, multiple rooms you have to protect and quite some humor. Rescue your crew mates in the story mode, get frustrated in challenge mode and claim your top spot in the global leaderboards in endless mode!
Story
You play as Dave Paprovsky, an astronaut who’s on his first space mission ever with his crew. The pilot, Azimah, Marcel, Lee and you thought this was just going to be an ordinary space mission, until you activate your hyper drive and Azimah, Marcel and Lee are kidnapped by aliens! Now, you’ll have to defend the rooms they were guarding from alien invasions until you get them back. You do this by killing a lot of aliens, of course.
The story in Spacejacked isn’t the longest or most exciting story ever, but it’s enough to get you going. It kind of gives the game a purpose, while it would otherwise just be killing aliens without anything to fight for. Now, you have to fight for the survival of your friends and yourself, which makes it (kind of) more exciting to do.
Graphics
Spacejacked doesn’t have the best graphics either, but it has a lot of charm and humor at times, especially when they make the crew members do a little dance after they’re rescued. While the game consists mostly of pixel art, it’s surprisingly nice to look at and it’s greatly detailed in its own way. All areas, enemies and other sprites look distinctively different and pretty, even if it’s a space clam shooting bubbles at you.
Sound
Music and sound effects also sound really great in Spacejacked. The music is very upbeat and fits perfectly with the fun and action-packed nature of the game. While it could’ve probably been more humorous with good voice acting, it’s still very enjoyable and the sounds and music won’t become boring any time soon.
Gameplay
Spacejacked is an all-out super fast-paced arcade tower-defense game. The controls are quite simple and it’s really fun to play with a controller. You simply run around, shift gravity, build, upgrade, sell turrets and shoot. While this might sound like a simple formula, Spacejacked is all but simple. You’ll be running around having to sell your turrets in one area because you’re running out of money while another area is under siege, and if you aren’t prepared for every kind of enemy you’ll die soon enough.
Control wise, there’s one thing that could be a lot better though. Because the game is so fast paced and limited amount of resources are available, you’ll have to sell and rebuild a lot of your turrets. This has to be done very quickly if you want to beat the incoming wave in time. The frustrating thing about this is that you have to interact with your turret first and then you have to choose to sell or upgrade it. It would’ve been much faster to assign hot keys to these actions because it would allow you to do all of this much faster when you’re rushed.
When it comes to the actual game modes, things couldn’t be better. When you start with the story mode, you’ll enter an excellent tutorial which is quite humorous. This teaches you the basics of the game and prepares you a very tiny bit of what’s going to be expected of you once you start for real. You have three main areas, each with a core that you have to defend. Once one of the cores gets destroyed, it’s game over. Each of these areas feature spots to build turrets: either a laser turret, gun turret or statis turret (statis turret slows down). You have the option to resell these turrets for full value or upgrade them with metal.
In the beginning you’ll only be defending one area at a time, but when things get uglier you’ll have to quickly switch from area to area in order to defend it. And on top of that, you might be running out of resources fairly quickly. Sometimes you have to rush to sell your turrets in one place to quickly rebuild them in another, this can get quite hectic and makes Spacejacked extremely fast-paced.
When you rescue crew members you’ll also unlock some more content and upgrades. You can unlock a mini game which gives you metal, a shop to upgrade your blaster and a programmer to change the way your turrets behave, which can heavily work in your favor.
Spacejacked also features two other game modes besides story. There’s the challenge mode, where you unlock challenges the further you get in the story mode, but these challenges aren’t for the faint hearted and are extremely difficult to complete. There’s also an endless mode where you can compete for your top spot in the leaderboards globally or between you and your friends.
Conclusion
All in all, Spacejacked was a fast ride from start to beginning. Not fast as in game time, because you’ll be sweating a lot down the road, but fast as in fast-paced. Everything later in the game is a rush and you’ll have to do your best to do everything on time, because if you’re not ready for a wave you’ll be pretty much dead. The only extremely annoying things are some of the controls and the difficulty level, which might be a bit too high for casual gamers.
Spacejacked - Review,
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