Grav - Atari ST (Longplay & Opinion)
2Grav is one of those one-man-band style games from Martin Brownlow which was an exclusive for the Atari ST. I have no idea what year it was made in, however it was a PD release, which sort of makes up for its shortcomings.
The game is a simple shooter where you control a spaceship in one of three levels, all of which are selectable from the start, where you have to achieve a few specific objectives before completing the level. It usually involves getting to the top of the stage and blasting the enemies along the way, which can be done via your standard guns or your bombs.
As you'd expect from a game made by a singular person, the visuals are functional, they are certainly nothing to write home about with the enemy guns being nothing more than grey triangles. The best visuals from my opinion are the splash effects from the explosions
Now if you've ever played the arcade classic Asteroids or the excellent Stardust on the Atari ST, then you will know how your craft controls as it has the same floaty physics. If you trust the ship in a direction, then it requires an equal amount of thrust in the opposite direction in order to make the craft stationary. The problem is with this is unlike Asteroids there are walls which one hit kill you everywhere and often you have to navigate your ship through tight areas. I've actually died more times from a slow collision with a wall than being attacked from any one of the baddies in the stage. Ultimately it comes across as frustrating as you don't always feel like you are in complete control of the spaceship, you do long for a more traditional control setup and just litter the levels with more enemies to rehance the challenge. My advice to playing this one is to move as slowly as possible, if you go too fast then you will certain not be able to stop yourself before you hit the impending wall. You are also given a limited amount of fuel so thrusting too much will cause you to fail the level.
I appreciate that some games are designed to be hard, however I like difficult games which have a tight control scheme and aren't difficult because of their hampering controls. Grav isn't really a shooter that I would want to play again, it dosen't really have any particular flair and its a short game overall.
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