GraphSpacer

GraphSpacer is an arena shooter with paper scribble style graphics. GraphSpacer’s main gameplay mechanic is that your ship has momentum, and you can only shoot in the direction of travel. This means that to shoot at an enemy, you need to move away from the enemy, slowly change your momentum in the other direction, and as you’re moving towards the enemy, hold the A button to fire. This releases a spray of bullets at your enemies, and hopefully some of them will hit. If they don’t, the bullets will then proceed to bounce off the walls 2 to 3 times, giving a greater chance of a hit.

The problem with this mechanic, is that instead of trying to aim your shots, it’s easier just to hold A and spam the arena with bullets. Although there’s an accuracy bonus at the end of each level, I ended up with almost 3 times the score by spamming rather than aiming. This turns the game from a arena shooter into an arena dodger, as all you need to do is avoid bumping into the enemies and lazers, hoping that your shots will find a way into the enemies.

Aside from the somewhat tedious gameplay, GraphSpacer presents crisp, if somewhat simplistic graphics, decent SFX/music and clean presentation. The only technical problem is that the collision detection is slightly picky if you’re trying to aim your shots, occasionally a clean hit will miss and phase through the enemy. Feature-wise, there’s an online scoreboard, but it appears I’m the only person with a score at the moment.

The main attempt at innovation here comes from the momentum based controls, but this isn’t entirely successful. It ends up taking away control from the user, and encourages the player to stay as still as possible, just making little circles in order to spam shots at enemies around the ship. Single-stick shooters can certainly work well, but the control mechanism makes for a rather average shooting experience.

GraphSpacer was created by quack and is available for a reasonable 200 points.

This title was 200 Points at the time of writing this review but has since been reduced to 80 Points.

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