Pulse-pounding Space Shooter for Serious Shmuppers

N.B.: You might prefer Jets'n'Guns Gold--$10 more, but almost double the levels and length of play of the original game.

We carry a lot of space shooters of various types, and it's easy to get blase about them sometimes--but at other times, you fire up a game and think "holy crap." Jets'n'Guns is a side-scrolling, Xevious-like game with loud, excellent music from alt-rock band Machinae Supremacy, nice eye-candy, and a huge number of upgrades for your ship, including fifty-something weapon types. It's not for the faint of heart, though; even if you crank the difficulty down, it's a tough game to beat. It's exceptionally well done, though, as the reviews bear out...

Death and Beauty

It's a paradox that the shmup--that old-school genre of frenetic space shooting--can create visuals that come closer to the status of abstract art than any other digital form... If you could ever look up from the intensity of combat long enough to really notice them.

Bullet Candy is a case in point; frenetic space mayhem, and beautiful imagery.

Charlie Knight, its creator, is clearly a long-standing enthusiast of the genre; he's created a highly polished, well executed examplar of the form, complete with "Minter levels" as an homage to Jeff Minter's landmark games. Shmup fans will find a lot to like here; novices are advised to turn the difficulty down as low as it will go (which isn't much).

Starscape is a great example how a small team that knows what its doing can pack a lot of gameplay into a small package--and Moonpod, a team of long-term industry vets turned indie, know precisely what they're doing.

At its heart, Starscape is a space "shmup" (shoot-em-up) with the kind of fast, intense shooting action you expect in a game of that style; but layered atop that is a game of resource management and tech development.