If you took a rhythm game like Rock Band and a shoot 'em up like Ikaruga and locked them in a filthy hotel room with a few dozen bottles of wine, in nine months, you might get something like Retro/Grade.
A PlayStation Network exclusive from indie developer 24 Caret, Retro/Grade takes the note highways of music games and combines them with aliens and explosions. Through a 10-level campaign and 130 challenges, it's your job to guide a minuscule spaceship and its pilot through lasers and black holes all by bopping between lines of traffic.
Retro/Grade's gimmick is that all the action is happening in reverse. The game actually begins with the final boss falling and the credits rolling. Then, a wormhole opens, sucks everything up, and we're moving backwards while trying to mimic every move that the spaceship theoretically already made.
And that's part of Retro/Grade's problem: in no time, it all feels familiar.
The idea is that you're getting the spaceship back in position to receive every shot it fired; these shots taking the place of the traditional music game's notes. As the shots come to the nose of your spaceship, you tap X (or strum your plastic guitar) to suck them back in. Hit it perfectly with the beat of the music, and you'll get a better score (which actually brings you closer to a score of zero as we're moving backwards). If you miss a note or run into a shot originally fired by an enemy, the health of the space-time continuum takes a hit. Deplete the health bar, and time is broken -- game over. Of course, there are power-ups to collect that let you rewind time to dodge mistakes and max out your score with a Star Power-like move, but that's the gist of the game.
Tapping X to nab a shot, ducking out of the way of enemy fire that's coming from the rear, and then sliding in to hold the X button and trace a laser shot across a few highways challenged me but at the same time rewarded me with a kaleidoscope of color and catchy beats.
The electronic score is one of Retro/Grade's crown jewels. Firing on all cylinders, my head bobbed as synth and drum sounds exploded in my headphones with each shot my spaceman successfully collected. It's an infectious soundtrack that's still in my head now -- I just wish there was more of it to go around as the challenges and levels can start to sound the same after a while.
And that's part of Retro/Grade's problem: in no time, it all feels familiar. There are six versions of the campaign, but these are just difficulty options that add or subtract note highways. Thus, there are just 10 levels to the campaign. Once I was done with my first run-through, I didn't feel like jumping back in or challenging the high score -- my mission was done. Imagine if Rock Band only came with a handful of songs to play over and over on different difficulties. It's not exactly the same here as there are more shots to collect and enemies to stop as the difficulty goes up and Retro/Grade costs $10, but you get the idea.
Retro/Grade's 130 challenges give you something else to do, but even these -- with levels at 120 percent the speed or with no power-ups -- are just rehashes of the levels we've been through with specific caveats. I liked unlocking the special ships and having more to do, but I wasn't compelled to "catch'em all."
Source : ign[dot]com
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