PixelJunk Shooter is a dual stick shooter that is a joy to play. The controls are simple. Left stick for movement, right stick for aim. Right trigger for shooting, holding the trigger will unleash missiles. The catch is that missiles will overheat your ship. Cave ship. Not a space ship. The left trigger sends out a grappling hook to pick up stranded miners, which is the objective of the game. When you get the stranded miners, it opens a door to the next level. Each 'stage' has a few levels in it.

The real selling point of this game is the incredible interaction that you have with the environment. You can destroy soft terrain. Your bullets will take out chunks and not the entire terrain / wall. There is water that is fluid and dynamic. It will also cool down your ship when it overheats. There are enemies and lava. The lava flows just as the water, makes your ship overheat and when it meets water, they bond together to form soft terrain that you can destroy. Its such a nice dynamic.

There are powerups to keep your ship cool from the lava's heat. There are objects that you can grapple and tow around, such as a water bomb, good for drowning a volcano. There is a watercan object that you fill in water or lava, and when you take it out, it showers whatever liquid you have in it. Again, there is a lot of interactivity in the game.

This is a game that rewards and encourages exploration. If it looks like there is a way off screen, that's probably a secret area with the game's main collectable diamonds. Well you need diamonds to progress past a certain stage. You will have to go back and play each stage a few times in order to collect enough hidden diamonds. While it might seem like a downer to replay stages and levels, its all fun. Nothing seems like a chore. Its soothing, relaxing, nice to look at and with the incredible interactivity that you have with your environment, no playthrough is really the same.

On top of it all, the game sets itself apart with its art style. Its a beautiful, simple style instead of typical dualstick shooters that overload you on bright visual effects.

It is well worth the price and you can probably pick it up in an indie bundle. I've also got the sequil on PSN and personally, I think this it better.

PixelJunk™ Shooter is a bit hard for me to categorize but lets call it a physics based Puzzle/Shooter thingy. While I am not a fan of the shooting in the game I don't mind the exploring or puzzle parts of the game and the few times the shooting/fighting shines is during the few boss fights in the game.

A pretty straight forward list of achievements mostly being for collecting the various scientists and gems in the levels which can be fairly challenging to find (at least the gems). The game also has an achievements for finding all secret areas so exploring is recommended. There are really only two achievements that might take some extra work and that is the big kill grind (1000 enemies) and an achievement for collecting 100 coins in a single spin. The later might take a few tries but can be made easier by using a guide to check out ideal spots for it.

Time to 100%: 9 hours

PixelJunk Shooter is a twin-stick shooter, with a very big focus on physics (specifically fluids). While exploring the underground caves of a planet, you'll have to interact with lava, water, liquid metal, ice and rock in order to save the scientists who are now trapped.

The story is basically that. You're in a ship, trying to save every scientist. And also collecting hidden gems. Whole it may seem a game about exploration, it didn't quite get to that point, in my opinion. But more on that later.

Let's start with presentation.
The graphics' style is very minimalistic, with soft colours, and yet, it looks great, in my opinion.
It certainly looks unique, and the fluids especially, give it a a special look.
The enemies have a mechanical feel to them, but it fits, along with the Boss Fights.

The music was less of a standout for me, but it was certainly not bad. Just a bit more faint than I'm used to, staying in the background for the most part. It helped with the light-hearted exploration-y atmosphere, I think it was well chosen for the game they were going for.
The sound effects were in the same vein.


How's the gameplay, then?
First off, the game is divided into 3 areas, each with a few levels. Each level also has about 4 (I think) areas to explore, each of them self contained, and fairly small.
The first area is more vulcanic, the second, deeper, is full of ice, and the third, the deepest, has an industrial feel to it.
Each of them has different mechanics associated with the physics. These are all connected to the area it's set in.

You control a little space ship, propelled by thrusters. The movement feels quite great actually, with momentum very notable in the ships handling. It feels great, even though there aren't section to challenge your pilloting skills. It's still good that the tight control is there while you're just flying around.

Then, you have a Hook/Tractor thing to pick up the gems and the scientists you find, and you also have missiles, to destroy rocks and your enemies.

There are also several different types of ships. You'll find modifiers in specific points of the levels. For the standard ship, lava with overheat you, while water will cool you off. Each time you get hit, you don't instantly die, but your heat will rise substancially. To survive, you can either back away, or dive into water.
Besides, you'll find ship modifiers around the levels, for when you need to actually progress the levels.
There is a Magma ship, that shoots lava, a Water ship that shoots water, and can pull ice with is hook, there's an inverted ship, that is hurt by water, and can dive on lava, and there's also a Magnetic ship that repels the liquid metal. These sound, and play really well, but they're highly limited to the levels. You'll only have access to them in the exact section that you need them, and there's no action from the player in discerning which ship he needs for the given section, unfortunately.

In each level, you'll try to find the scientists. You have to deal with all of them in each area to unlock the next one (either save them, or kill them). Every time a scientist dies, you'll lose a life. Your limit is 5, but you'll gain another one each time you collect 100 coins (these are spread around the levels, and also dropped by the enemies).
You also try to find gems, that are used to unlock levels, or just for achievements. Unfortunately, these are very easy to miss by mistake, and you'll have to replay the whole level if you want to 100% it (it is NOT needed, though. I did some thorough exploration the first time around, found every secret area, and still missed a couple of gems in many of the levels. I never had the need to replay levels to proceed though, so the game was designed to keep you going naturally, saving these for the completionists. That's really good, in my view!).
There are also Special Scientists that you collect in your Gallery (yeah, not creepy at all), and these will talk to you, giving you a bit of backstory into their expedition.

The base of the game is out of the way, now.

This game reminded my a bit of Waking Mars. Besides both being about exploring the caves, both are very focused about combining elements (in WM, it's mostly interacting with the creatures, in PJShooter, is with the fluids). While Waking Mars gave you a real feeling of discovery, learning about each species and all about their lives and interactions, that isn't very present in PixelJunk Shooter.
PixelJunk Shooter is a very straightforward game, and also not very challenging. It's something to enjoy casually.

The level design was pretty good, in my opinion, providing good areas to experiment with the fluids, and learn new mechanics without a wall of text. While that was all there and great, the whole game felt like a very big tutorial, in a way. Everything was subtle, but not challenging, and specially not giving the player much freedom.
You'll have everything delivered into your hands when you need it, there's no puzzle solving, or anything, which wasn't what I was expecting. So, if you're looking for an experience of discovery and learning, go play Waking Mars.
If, on the other hand, you want a laid back twin stick shooter with cool physics, give this one a try.

The Boss Fights were the funnest part of the game, for me. They weren't very hard either, as you were pretty comfortable even after getting hit (as long as you were careful). But that comfort gave you the time to learn the Bosses patterns without it feeling frustrating, and led to interesting fights.

I found the game enjoyable, certainly, but in a way that I wasn't expecting. It's very, very linear. There isn't trial and error to understand the fluids, or anything. It's not about learning the mechanics, and then applying them into more complex puzzles. It's mostly about learning on the go, always with simple puzzles. And to be honest... that's fine.
It may not be what you're looking for, but it's good that it exists, for people who do. And it's a very well done game for its purpose.

It's also very cheap on sale and you can easily get it. Go ahead and give this one a try if it sounds appealing!

"Makers of PixelJunk Racers, Monsters, and Eden and just like all their other installments, Shooter specializes in simplicity, familiarity, and over all fun. The music was composed by Alex Paterson and Dom Beken. Anyway enough of the back ground lesson let us dive into the actual review of PixelJunk shooter!

Story: The story is quite simplistic to say the least, to put simply there are scientists who are trapped underground and need rescuing. Your character pilots a twin shooter subterranean vehicle built for blasting through the rock and mud as well as a pod for picking up the stranded scientists along the way you encounter a verity of different obstacles as well as monsters and you’ll be so happy they equipped your tiny ship with guns (very insignificant weak guns but they get the job done….eventually)..."

Read the full review on Broken Analog: http://brokenanalog.com/?p=44265

PixelJunk Shooter is, as the name suggests, a shooting game. You control a yellow ship which is sent to help out some scientists on a planet in which after alot of digging something went wrong. The story is told when you rescue certain survivors, colored ones, which upon pickup will show up a text screen telling something that happened previously during the excavations. You progress through the game by picking up gems and survivors which will then unlock new areas for you to play. Gameplay wise the ship control is really smooth and satisfying with a some pretty decent shooting, your ship has 2 standard attacks, one that shoots projectiles if you keep tapping the attack button and if you hold it down you'll launch homing missiles. The level design and the visuals are pretty well done, considering it's a 2D game and as you progress to later levels the difficulty really ramps up at a fair pace keeping the game challenging even when you already master the game. Besides having to kill enemies on each level and rescuing survivors and gathering gems you'll find yourself most of the times trying to solve some sort of puzzles in which you need to manipulate various type of terrain either it is ice or rock and liquids such as water and lava or even gas or deadly black goo. Overall PixelJunk Shooter is a pretty fun game to play when you're bored or if you're looking for something casual, you can easily beat it in around 6 hours or so and it's a pretty good time. If you're a fan of PixelJunk games you'll probably also enjoy this one and if you do enjoy this one but haven't played Monsters or Eden you should totally check those two.

PixelJunk Shooter is a dual stick shooter that is a joy to play. The controls are simple. Left stick for movement, right stick for aim. Right trigger for shooting, holding the trigger will unleash missiles. The catch is that missiles will overheat your ship. Cave ship. Not a space ship. The left trigger sends out a grappling hook to pick up stranded miners, which is the objective of the game. When you get the stranded miners, it opens a door to the next level. Each 'stage' has a few levels in it.

The real selling point of this game is the incredible interaction that you have with the environment. You can destroy soft terrain. Your bullets will take out chunks and not the entire terrain / wall. There is water that is fluid and dynamic. It will also cool down your ship when it overheats. There are enemies and lava. The lava flows just as the water, makes your ship overheat and when it meets water, they bond together to form soft terrain that you can destroy. Its such a nice dynamic.

There are powerups to keep your ship cool from the lava's heat. There are objects that you can grapple and tow around, such as a water bomb, good for drowning a volcano. There is a watercan object that you fill in water or lava, and when you take it out, it showers whatever liquid you have in it. Again, there is a lot of interactivity in the game.

This is a game that rewards and encourages exploration. If it looks like there is a way off screen, that's probably a secret area with the game's main collectable diamonds. Well you need diamonds to progress past a certain stage. You will have to go back and play each stage a few times in order to collect enough hidden diamonds. While it might seem like a downer to replay stages and levels, its all fun. Nothing seems like a chore. Its soothing, relaxing, nice to look at and with the incredible interactivity that you have with your environment, no playthrough is really the same.

On top of it all, the game sets itself apart with its art style. Its a beautiful, simple style instead of typical dualstick shooters that overload you on bright visual effects.

It is well worth the price and you can probably pick it up in an indie bundle. I've also got the sequil on PSN and personally, I think this it better.