Shadowgrounds

An incredible action game that harkens back to the old days playing Alien Breed. The game has that "just a little bit longer" addictiveness that's so hard to find. Each of the game's multiple weapons has it's own upgrade options and upgrade points are fairly limited. Seems like you're always trying to get just one more upgrade point for a really cool ability--or spending the points you've been saving on something that can get you through a tough spot. The levels in the game are fairly straight forward but there are often enough little branches and hidden caches to make exploration worthwhile. Ammo for the best guns is often in short supply so those caches make a nice reward. The early levels of this game are a bit basic but stay with it--the later levels get a lot better. I'm giving it 4 stars only because the sequel is even better.

I got this on Steam over a year ago not expecting much and man was I pleasantly surprised! I got into the B-Movie plot pretty fast. The protagonist can be pretty contrived at times but I like the other characters a lot and the dialogue and voice acting is decent. What sucked me into the plot though was the very well done atmosphere and suspense. Yes, this game did make my hands sweat. Enemies are cleverly placed and will emerge from realistic hiding places, but I was never sure where! They may drop down in front of me, sneak up from behind, or my ambush may just backfire! Seeing my enemies scaling a wall I'd already triple checked made me paranoid as all hell. The dependency on the flashlight probably helped a lot with the fright, but it helped with the atmosphere as well. The way it plays across the environment and reveals new things makes me wonder if the devs took some influence from Doom 3. Of course the game play is rock solid or I wouldn't of stayed sucked in. The weapon upgrade system, while ridiculously standard, actually lets you feel the effects of your upgrades pretty fast and keeps weaker weapons like the pistol useful later in the game. The weapons themselves are pretty diverse and allow for a number of strategies, and thankfully the levels are set up to where you could use a bad attack strategy and get killed. I never did find a "one solution" for all problems or an over powered weapon. The pistol may have been a little over powered, but I found it too difficult to use later in the game with tons of enemies on screen. Level design and flow is a mix of old school deliciousness and realism. By realism I mean you'll have health packs stored in lockers or storage rooms and weapons in armories. Old school in that the game is reminiscent of games like Alien Breed. However I'm finding the Doom 3 influence apparent in the level design as well. You start off in a more comfortable setting and then you start coming across more and more creepy things, some of which are quite subtle like a broken air vent. And then of course you'll come across blood stains and mutilated bodies. Levels also give you quite a bit of room to explore and take alternate routes, removing the sense of linearity and increasing the immersion. The biggest thing I should note about the levels is the logs every one leaves scattered about on PDAs. The text is well written and serves as premonition as well as filing in the back story. They also tell a few different side stories. I actually felt bad when I found the PDA that ended a story in tragedy. My biggest complaint is the inability to save during missions. Each mission takes about an hour so that can be pretty frustrating, especially during the final mission where you have to face an insanely hard final boss at the end, but if you die fighting him you have you restart the whole mission! Another low point is the archaic 5 life system that destroys the balance. You have five lives to complete each mission and they reset after each mission. Each time you die you go back to the last check point you passed, but nothing is changed or reset when you die! Any enemies you killed are not respawned, so you can essentially "sacrifice" a few lives to get passed a really hard part, but if you run out of lives it's game over and you have to restart the mission. As a whole I adore this game. It took me around ten hours to beat the whole game so I'd say it's well worth the ten dollars. It's worth a second play through as well! Hell I almost went out and bought the hardcopy just to hold it in my hands. It's just a well done title that any top-down shooter fan could appreciate. While other games out there have better overall gameplay, few have that awesome sci-fi b-movie vibe or an atmosphere that can compete with blockbuster games.

It's not a big AAA game, just an Indie top-down shooter with a B-move's story. So don't got big expectations, but it's still fun. You control a tech guy - with weak voice acting - who became the hero. Something is go wrong on Ganymede colony, first you thought is a simple blackout, but soon come weird creatures from the moon core. Which of course getting bigger and bigger. But don't worry, you can pick-up an arsenal of weapons! Oh yes, from standard pistol to chaingun, flamethrower, rocket-launcher and high-tech experimental weapons! You can also upgrade them with the collected points by killling enemies. Of course you got a flashlight to watch the monsters in the darkness. :) Got a few companion passives and actives. The game got a great soundtrack by Ari Pulkkinen. Somekind of techno/remix type with some choir, maybe sound weird but its totally fit to the game. If you love sci-fi and Indie games it's your game! And wait it's stand-alone expansion Survivor.

Shadowgrounds is an overhead shooter, wherein you shoot lots and lots of aliens in the face while wandering through maze-like buildings. This tried-and-true formula is foolproof as long as you can bring the goods (solid gameplay), and indeed, these kinds of games were pumped out at an incredible rate in the old days. While Shadowgrounds is a decent game, I think it suffers from a few recurring shortcomings. Shadowgrounds uses a 3D rendering engine with a viewing frustum. The camera is suspended in the air, looking almost straight down, and the player is locked to the bottom-center of the screen. In turn, the camera rotation is locked to the player's direction, so that your firearm will always be pointing straight ahead. (There's a freelook mode that behaves more like a traditional overhead shooter, but I didn't bother with it much.) This setup is more technically advanced than classic overhead 2D, but I feel it introduces problems with visibility. There are beams over most doors, arches holding together tube-like passages, stacks of crates positioned for tactical assistance, and the occasional horizontal pipe spanning the upper-section of a room. You cannot see through these things. Many doors have a blind spots directly behind them, thanks to these beams. Tall stacks of crates can partially hide monsters. And these blind spots vary depending on your position, because of perspective. Now, one *could* put a bunch of view-obstructing things into a 2D overhead shooter, but most developers *didn't*, at least to that extent. You get numerous weapons, which I think are all pretty good, but the game won't autoswitch to another weapon when your current one is out of ammo! Fumbling with the number keys or mouse wheel while getting swarmed by aliens is very frustrating, and several weapons run empty for long stretches. The pistol gets infinite ammo, so you can always fall back on it, but you have to click for every shot, against enemies that take multiple hits to die. Sometimes I switched to pistol when I ran out of ammo with some other gun, just because I knew it would work, but owmyhand. I also had issues with the shotgun sometimes not firing after a reload. By the way, you'll want to upgrade those weapons as soon as possible. These aren't just modest improvements to your arsenal: many weapons can be upgraded to deal double damage very early on. I stupidly ignored the upgrade system until the first boss kicked my ass. Shadowgrounds' enemies are pretty much excellent! They appear in large swarms, crawling out of vents and climbing up cliffs, and some of the more powerful ones force open doors during scripted sequences. Many behave differently if you cast light on them: one type of spider shies away, another lunges in anger! Some are big dumb idiots that walk directly towards you, others strafe between shots and try to keep away from you. Some can turn invisible, and can only be revealed using the light (...okay, those guys are kind of annoying.) Boss design I felt was a bit overbearing and difficult to get the hang of at first, but decent. Good stuff all around. Movement is smooth for the most part, but you can get caught on props and the corners of walls. Nothing game-breaking, but it can leave you vulnerable. Your allies block you when you're trying to backpedal from aliens (argh!). You can quickly dodge with the space bar, but not when wielding certain heavy weapons. The progression format is a sticking issue for some people. The game saves only at the beginning of missions, and you have a limited number of lives. Die, and you'll respawn at a checkpoint. After five deaths, it's back to the start of the mission. There's no quicksave, no "save & quit". I personally had trouble with one of the checkpoints, which kept placing me in a donut-shaped room filled with armored monsters I hadn't encountered before. I died and died until I realized that they were susceptible to grenades. Having said that, I never had to completely restart any mission, but I sure would have been pissed if that happened. Did I mention that the missions are fairly long? :) To sum up: 3D perspective + architecture occasionally hampers visibility, weapons are problematic, movement is a bit unreliable, enemies are great, and the save system is pretty demanding.