Astrolancer First Playthrough
0Astrolancer is a game that clearly draws inspiration from a certain NES top-down-action-adventure-and-shmup hybrid.
That being said, this game is quite a bit more linear and streamlined. It's not bad, but it proves to be a relatively quick playthrough on one of the lower difficulties. The art and music are great, and there are enough alternate weapons and ARMS to find something that interests you, though I think I found most of my favorites pretty quickly.
In retrospect, I kind of wish I had picked challenging instead of normal. I mostly didn't due to the way the difficulties were phrased, but I suspect that "normal" could've been named "easy", given that it also disables the enemy force mechanic - though that mechanic seems to exist simply to pad playtime by giving you a reason not to skip too many enemies, given that enemies respawn anyway so the percentage is meaningless.
I did try out the higher difficulties for a bit, which I discuss at the end; IMO, they really don't scale well. The higher two difficulties sometimes throw impossibly dense patterns at you, which might be okay if you had as much HP as you would in a Euroshmup or late-game TGL, or if your hitbox were smaller as in bullet hell shmups. Neither of those things are true, however, so this feels like an exercise in futility. And while the thrust mechanic can be used to dodge through bullets, (1) it doesn't erase them, and (2) its already-discouragingly-long cooldown period is doubled on those difficulties. The highest difficulty additionally advertises that "things will be different", but I'm not sure if this amounts to anything more than a few additional surprise enemy attacks/properties or sheer numbers.
Ultimately, I don't feel like this has much in the way of replayability, but it's a good single playthrough, so maybe grab it on sale (though to be fair, it's $6 USD to begin with).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2842600/ASTROLANCER/