Jan 25, 2018

PC Gamer

I don’t know anything about IP addresses, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing me down. I reconnect broken network connections in the glare of an ancient CRT monitor, typing heavily on a mechanical keyboard in deep space. I’m the only crewman free to move around the RMS Tartarus, a crippled corporate mining ship floundering in orbit over Neptune. I’m the ship’s cook. Even so, I’ve spent hours running from the bridge to the reactor room to the cargo bay, doing jobs I was never trained to do on computer systems more archaic than futuristic.

Tartarus is my favorite sort of science fiction: it’s a story about people and a crisis that just happens to be set on a spaceship. It’s about people working dangerous jobs with equipment that company management won’t pay to upgrade. Though it shows a lot of promise, Tartarus is also too short, and its overall lack of polish and some questionable design decisions show how hard puzzle games are to get right.

Open

Tartarus’s grungy, retro sci-fi look is heavily inspired by the Nostromo from Alien. There are no sleek curves or Star Trek-style touchscreens here; everything is pipes, steel, keyboards, and wires. It’s a practical ship built on the cheap to make profits, like a deep sea oil rig that flies. The Weyland-Yutani fetish is more than an affectation; manually turning valves and plugging through ancient computer systems is the heart of the puzzles Tartarus needs you to solve.

Most of the puzzles are solved by man-handling programs inside of the Tartarus’s old-fashioned command line interface. If you’ve never worked inside a command line, that’s not surprising, but imagine trying to re-organize your iTunes library without a monitor, and you’ll start to see the edges of the challenge.

I’m not a programmer or a command-line aficionado, but I found the terminal language in Tartarus easy to pick up. Type LIST to see all of the files and folders in your current directory; type SF [folder name] to go into that folder, then type LIST again to see what’s in there. If you hit a dead-end, type SF.. to go back. RUN a program if you find one, OPEN a .txt file to read it, and SCAN ship sectors to see what systems you might be able to CONNECT to.

Opening a new tab to consult Wikipedia or pressing the calculator shortcut key on my keyboard is so second-nature to me that I don’t consider them miraculous at all. In Tartarus, I ended up using a notebook, pen, and the calculator on my (real-life) smartphone, and when I was crunching through a thick terminal puzzle in Tartarus, I was having one of the best times I’ve had in a puzzle game in a long time.

My favorite puzzle had me crawling around the ship’s navigation/command room rebuilding a primitive terminal network, pinging IP addresses and consulting my notes for MAC hardware IDs. When lights started to go green and the network started to come online, I felt like an absolute genius, a savant discovering a new talent in a moment of crisis.

Many of the puzzles are also very difficult—almost punishingly difficult. For the most part, if I got stuck I found that if I took a break and came back the next day, I’d eventually solve the problem with fresh eyes. There was only one terminal puzzle that I had to solve by sheer brute force. For the most part, I relished the challenge any time I was near a keyboard.

Reboot

I always had fun in a terminal, but I never had fun in a hallway, and I got stuck there twice as often.

If the entire game took place inside the computer terminals, I would be a very happy cook-turned-computer-genius. Unfortunately, about half of the puzzles involve wandering the empty halls of the ship itself, looking for hatchways or lost items. I always had fun in a terminal, but I never had fun in a hallway, and I got stuck there twice as often.

To be fair, I’m the type of person who gets lost in linear FPS levels. When I hit dead ends in games like Doom and Wolfenstein I can spend half an hour walking in circles before realizing there was a door just behind me. Tartarus is a huge, city-sized ship full of empty space to run across, and so of course I got lost. But besides my own superhuman ability to get turned around inside a pair of jeans, I was hamstrung in a couple of places by doors that could only be opened when I stood in front of them at the right angle and the right distance. When I walked by too close and couldn’t open the door, I’d continue on my way and complete another lap of Tartarus Olympic Stadium.

As I walked patiently around Tartarus to get in my 10,000 steps for the day, the magic of the place started to wear thin. The phrase 'a mile wide but an inch deep' kept popping up in my mind. There are so many doors that don’t open. Why can I climb some ladders but not others? There are so many computer terminals that I can’t reach because they’re not part of the game’s linear path; they only exist to be decoration.

For as much as I loved the virtual space inside Tartarus, I really couldn’t get along with the physical space at all. The story and the puzzles that I loved so much would have been better served on a ship the size of Serenity rather than a city-sized hulk like Red Dwarf.

I wrapped up Tartarus in about six hours, and sadly I don t think playing it again would be as much fun.

I also had some issues with the graphics in Tartarus. In particular, I seemed to get some rough screen tearing and artifacting. Updating drivers and tweaking anything I could didn’t seem to help. Luckily it wasn’t too distracting, and it was only noticeable while walking through well-lit parts of the ship—which is actually a pretty rare occurrence, what with the ship being on emergency power and all.

I wrapped up Tartarus in about six hours, and sadly I don’t think playing it again would be as much fun. I want more, though. More puzzles, more computer systems to bash through, more terminals hooked up to nuclear reactors and artificial gravity fields. But as much as I enjoyed them, there was some seriously annoying busy work between the puzzles that sours them. Whenever Tartarus tries to be about action or exploration instead of computers, it fails.

Jan 25, 2018

Celeste review

PC Gamer

Celeste is an adventure about overcoming adversity, and what better way to simulate adversity than with a punishingly difficult platformer? Don’t let that scare you, though. For those who have finished (or almost finished) the likes of Super Meat Boy, 1001 Spikes, and N++, Celeste probably won’t feel difficult at all. And that’s because, crucially, Celeste is a game that feels designed to accommodate people who can’t complete those games. Rather than being hard for its own sake (sometimes, in the right hands, a good thing), Celeste is hard for a reason that dovetails with its themes and narrative. And much like the demons that haunt the game’s protagonist, the difficulty does relent. You will finish this game. But if you’re like me, you’ll die upwards of 3,000 times doing so.

You play as Madeline, a mopey young girl hellbent on climbing the titular Celeste Mountain. It’s a tall, dangerous, seemingly haunted mountain: not the kind you’d normally want to climb. But Madeline does, because it seems to her that she can’t get anything else right in her life. She can’t make peace with herself or anyone around her, so why not dive headfirst into a superfluous and insurmountable challenge? Why not indeed.

It’s a twitch platformer: one must move with the utmost precision, usually very quickly, from the beginning of the screen to the end of it. Spikes, red ooze, fatal falls… all the usual environmental hazards are here, and they’ll all kill you on impact. Madeline can jump, dash (both mid-air and on the ground), and she can also climb walls and cliff faces. For the bulk of the game that’s all she can do, though certain environmental features, specific to each of the worlds, tinker with this format in a variety of ways. You’ll find jump pads, red glowing balls that hurtle you endlessly in any given direction, and green diamonds which, if touched mid-air, grant Madeline an extra mid-air dash. And this is just to name a few: Celeste never stops adding modifiers to its simple two-button platforming schematic, and most of them are centred around momentum.

Celeste has a ground-is-lava feel best captured recently in Ori and the Blind Forest

Some are better than others. Chaining jump dashes between green diamonds is a treat, as is manipulating directional blocks to leap deftly through levels. At times, Celeste has a ground-is-lava feel best captured recently in Ori and the Blind Forest, in the way it has you charging through the cosmos in a graceful, balletic dance.

I have to be pedantic though, and mention a certain “twist” that doesn’t work: wind. When it’s blowing in Madeline’s favour, it’s plenty of fun to course through the air and between hurdles at three times the normal speed. But the moments when she must press against it feel like navigating through treacle. In an otherwise brilliant and challenging platformer, these are among the most tedious moments I’ve experienced in a modern 2D game. Celeste is about snappy, die-and-immediately-try-again gameplay, and this goddamned wind is a huge momentum killer. I had to take a break from the game, not because a challenge was especially hard, but because the wind tied knots in my chest. It was just so annoying, in the way it undermined the thrill of learning the best course through a problem. Sure, you’re at high altitude, and sure, there would be wind. But the wind sucks, and videogames aren’t real. Thankfully, the especially grating examples of this are few and far between.

C'est la vie

What makes Celeste really interesting is the way it weaves its narrative around this twitch platforming template. Conventional wisdom states that if a platformer is to have a narrative worth following, it must usually be an exploratory Metroidvania affair, or else it must be easy, lest you not feel the gratification of closure. But this story of a young girl’s efforts to make peace with herself is full of story beats and, crucially, narrative justification for the feel of its gameplay. One can assume that scaling a scary and mysterious mountain is tough, but the reason Madeline is scaling it, and the things we learn about her as she does, lends a sense of urgency and purpose to this toughness.

The familiar pattern of failing and trying again, over and over, sometimes seemingly to no avail, is very much a part of Madeline’s frame of mind: whether she’s scaling a mountain or not. In this way, Celeste feels less like a niche game for fans of difficulty, and more like one that utilises its gameplay rhythms in a way that will feel meaningful to everyone. It helps that the platforming is leavened with more open-ended areas focused on light puzzling, and these often double as tutorials for the new elements that will prevail for the next few play sessions.

There are characters in Celeste, and while they’re cutesy (a trait you can blame for the Banjo-Kazooie-esque garbled speech) they’re all haunted by their own demons. There’s the crazed hotelier, the happy-go-lucky thrill seeker, the sour old woman, and importantly, the character known as Part of Me. This is basically the sullen, fatalistic version of Madeline, a haunted, spectral figure that naysays everything the protagonist does. “Are you the weak Part of Me, or the lazy part?” Madeline asks this spectre at one point, while on the receiving end of her naysaying. Part of Me replies: “I’m the pragmatic part.” Madeline’s determination could read as a banal retreading of the “anything is possible” motif so frequently ladled out by American cinema and blockbuster videogames, but the message isn’t quite as bluntly hopeful as that.

Ascension

But what really sets Celeste apart, aside from what many players will regard as window-dressing (the story), is the fact that you’ll finish it. Twitch platformers are my bread and butter, I love them, they’re the games I cherish the most. But I’ve never finished Super Meat Boy, I’ll never finish N++, and 1001 Spikes can die in a fire, though I love it dearly. I’m happy to play a game for as long as I’m capable and not finish it, but many aren’t. This game is for those who aren’t. Those looking for an especially caustic challenge can find cassettes throughout Celeste’s world which “remix” the game in dramatically devious ways, but I’m fairly certain that anyone, with the right amount of determination, can complete the core game. I did so in about ten hours. If you can finish Shovel Knight, you can finish this.

And that’s probably my favourite aspect of Celeste: it wields difficulty in a meaningful way, but not in a way that will solely appeal to masochists and speedrunners. It reminds me of The End is Nigh, in the way its difficulty is not just a longevity-oriented feature, but a core vehicle for helping the player understand what the game is about. It’s true that you’ll feel invested in Madeline’s story; it’s true that her mental and emotional trajectory is one you want to see come good. But overall, this is a twitch platformer that feels paced like a blockbuster action videogame: there are moments that allow you to breath and reflect, there are opportunities to feel strong and times you’ll feel hopeless. It knows when to give you a break, it knows when to really dig its claws in. I’d recommend 1001 Spikes to basically no one but myself, but I’d recommend Celeste to anyone.

Jan 24, 2018

7 things I wish I knew before playing My Time In Portia

My Time at Portia

My Time At Portia is a farm-life sim RPG that arrived in Early Access this week, and so for the past two days I've been harvesting, crafting, building, farming, exploring, and adventuring. And most importantly, learning. While at times Portia can be a bit of a grind, it's quickly proving to be a colorful and absorbing world to spend time in.

Below, I've come up with a few tips to make your early hours a bit easier to navigate while you bring your own workshop up to snuff. They're all things I wish I'd known before I started playing.

Keep an eye on the clock

In Portia, the clock is always ticking, and ticking very quickly. In a lot of sandbox crafting games we're used to staying up all night, hammering away at stone walls or hacking down stubborn trees. despite how late its gotten.

Not so in the world of Portia: when it reaches 3:00 am, you will quite literally fall asleep wherever you are and whatever you're doing. This isn't always problematic—you wake up fully rested at home, so in some ways it can occasionally be convenient—but if you're in the middle of something it's decidedly a nuisance to suddenly slip into a coma. If you're planning an excursion to a distant area, or have some specific goals for the day, keep in mind that when the day ends, it really ends. Leave early if you've got something major to do.

But don't leave too early. If you get out of bed and sprint into town to visit a shop, you're going to discover the shops are still closed. They open at 8, so give the owners time to get out of their beds and get to work or you'll be standing around tapping your foot.

Mining costs money, so plan your spelunking

Mining is not only my least favorite activity in Portia, but it's also something you have to pay to do. Using the starter mine costs you 80 gold per visit (the game calls currency gols, which feels to me like a typo, so I'm just gonna call it gold), and with so many crafting items requiring copper and tin, you'll need to be spending a lot of time in the uninteresting, gloomy mine smashing a pickaxe against the floor.

In your early hours, gold won't be the easiest thing to come by, and you'll want to be saving it for certain expensive items like upgrade kits or, well, mine visits. Which means your trips to the mine should be as fruitful as possible. When you find yourself needing just a couple more units of copper for something, it's tempting to just pop in and pop back out, but doing that too many times will be a drain on your finances. So, when you're going to mine, make a full day of it and get as much as you can on each trip. Free up room in your inventory and prepare to spend the entire day grinding for relics and resources.

Read your mail, even if you don't want to

Outside your workshop is a mailbox, and just about every day there will be something new in it. I kind of ignored it for a while, simply because I had my own to-do list I was working on (and who needs more mail in their life?), but not only will you find new jobs in the mail, but also news about special events.

For instance, I was wondering why there was a little icon that looked like a present blinking on my screen. Turns out, there's a holiday in Portia where airships fly over the town and drop presents.

I'd have known that if I'd read my mail, but I hadn't, so I didn't, and thus was late to the festival and had to run around like a madman trying to grab the remaining few presents before all the kids did, which left me feeling like some kind of desperate, greedy jerk. Which, quite frankly, I am.

Workshop jobs get complex almost immediately

To prove myself as a builder, first I had to make a hatchet of stone and wood. Then I had to craft a pickaxe. My third job was to put together an entire multi-section bridge made of copper pipe and hardwood, which required several new workbenches and resources (including a different hatchet capable of cutting down the proper tree for the hardwood). My current gig is to build an entire friggin' car. So, there's quite a sudden leap in complexity going from making a hatchet to taking on a massive construction job.

Luckily, there are lots of smaller jobs you can nose around for while you're waiting for days to pass and your copper to melt into bars that you can then turn into pipes. If you take on a job that seems a little too complex, don't feel like you have to get it done instantly. You can still find other, smaller commissions that you can tackle in the meantime, sometimes something as simple as fixing someone's fence or crafting a fishing pole.

Spend money to increase your inventory

With only 16 slots in your inventory, and another 8 on your hotbar, you'll fill up your pockets pretty quickly. I assumed there would be a way to unlock all the locked slots, perhaps by finding a backpack or possibly by leveling up, but it's simpler than that. Click on a locked row, and you'll have the option to spend gold to pay for more slots. I had no idea it was that simple until I actually did it.

Stamina is weird

I was running around at top speed, leaping over fences, and gathering berries and sticks, when I suddenly noticed I couldn't gather berries and sticks anymore. That's because I was out of stamina which, oddly, doesn't stop you from running around at top speed and leaping over fences.

Think of stamina almost as special action points, since you can still move and run like the energetic kid you are while at the same time you're so exhausted that you'll be unable to, say, pick something up, or kick a tree or swing a sword. You can't even go fishing when your stamina is drained. There's something frustrating about having an object in front of you that you're simply too tired to pick up, especially if that object is an apple that would give you a few points of stamina.

Simply standing still won't recover your stamina (though it will replenish your sprint meter). Recovering stamina can be accomplished by eating certain foods, so keep something to munch on in your pocket at all times. But mostly you'll want to sleep in your bed to completely refill your stamina meter.

You can win certain fights by running away

At one point, in order to gain access to a particular mine, you have to best one of the other characters in a sparring contest. I had not had much luck sparring at the time—in a fight with a newspaper reporter, I punched her roughly 100 times, and then at the end of the fight she knocked me out cold with just a couple jabs. So, I wasn't too keen on getting my butt handed to me again.

So, when it came time to prove myself worthy of entering the mine, I simply spent a minute running away from my opponent. I just ran in a big circle like a coward. And it worked! In a regular sparring session this would be considered a draw, but here it was a successful bout of survival. See, you don't always have to put fist-to-face to get what you need.

Jan 24, 2018

Slay the Spire is a brilliant genre mash-up with third-act problems

Slay the Spire

The joy of a roguelike is cobbling together a winning strategy out of the junk you find lying around on the side of the road—or in this case the side of a corridor in a murdertower full of slime monsters. The joy of a deckbuilding game, whether a physical one like Dominion or a videogame like Hand of Fate, is in building something greater than the sum of its parts. Slay the Spire, which has been in Early Access since November but which we all seem to have become aware of last week when it soared up the Steam charts, is a gorgeous collision of those two joys. I got it last Friday and it basically swallowed my weekend whole.

After each encounter with a monster on my way up the spire, I’m offered three cards to pick from, adding one to my deck. In early runs I eagerly grab a card out of each spread, fattening my deck as much as I can. Later, I’m more judicious, more cautious about assembling a specific strategy.

In Slay the Spire your character is your deck. While some cards are individually more powerful than others, simply accumulating strong cards isn’t enough. Various mechanical themes run through the card sets (there are two characters in the game currently, The Ironclad and The Silent, each with their own set), and they clearly direct you towards building decks that synergize, that combine effects to multiply their impact.

There’s no way to keep a card out of your deck while holding onto it for later, and opportunities to permanently remove cards from your deck are few. So there are trade-offs: you can take a card early that immediately adds dead weight to your deck, but which you hope will become a cornerstone of your strategy later, when you have other pieces of the puzzle to combine with it. Adding improved versions of the basic attack and defense cards will raise the overall power of your deck, but they will also lower your chances of drawing your more important synergistic cards later on.

Changing your deck by a single card feels significant it s not a matter of playing the numbers, like making small changes to a Hearthstone or Magic deck.

One card, Fiend Fire, destroys all cards in your hand (removing them from the game until the end of the fight) and deals damage corresponding to the number of cards destroyed. In one of my runs, I had a whole strategy built up around this—draw a ton of cards to fill my hand then unload it all in one enormous attack. Another deck archetype goes the opposite route, using a Power (a card that becomes a persistent buff for the duration of a fight) that deals damage to enemies for every spell played, and then combining that with a mass of free cards to win by a thousand cuts. Though there are two characters, each has three or four distinct deck archetypes.

Each turn you draw five cards, and at the end of the turn you discard your whole hand. This velocity makes it much punchier than most card games, there’s no planning for next turn, or sculpting your hand. There’s no sensation of powerlessness when you draw a hand you know is very weak—it’ll be gone next turn.

As you cycle rapidly through your cards, you’ll see your entire deck pretty much every significant fight. If you have cards that are underpowered or don’t fit with your strategy, they will always show up and be a problem. Changing your deck by a single card feels significant—it’s not a matter of playing the numbers, like making small changes to a Hearthstone or Magic deck.

The deck feels like a dynamic, living thing, both across the strategic layer of the whole game and in individual fights. Deck composition and card-drawing are the heart of a card game: Slay the Spire highlights that heart, making it the center of what your character is and what you can do. Some enemies gum up your deck by inserting useless cards into it, some risk-reward choices give you a benefit in exchange for inserting a dead 'curse' card into your deck.

Combat itself has a push-your-luck quality that suits the roguelike design. You can deal damage to enemies by playing cards, or you can block—blocking means adding temporary hit points to your character, which clear out at the start of your next turn. Monsters show their next move as an icon above them, letting you anticipate what they’ll do and either block or attack accordingly.

This leads to a lot of interesting turns, with tactical decisions that have true strategic ramifications. Ideally, you want to block every attack completely. Healing is hard to come by in this game, and every point of true damage you take could be the start of a spiral that ends your run. But at the same time, playing too conservatively can lead to failure too—slow and steady doesn’t always win the race, as enemies will buff themselves to overwhelm your blocking, or inevitably a bad hand will leave you unable to prevent damage anyway.

I often feel like I reach the final boss just as I m getting my feet under me in terms of having a deck I like.

Even seemingly simple turns can become a difficult calculation. Is it worth taking one damage this turn to get an attack in? Is it worth spending your first turn setting up your powers for the rest of the fight, and just "face tanking" a big hit for it?

Compounding all this is a panoply of distinct monsters with unique mechanics and behaviors to them. It’s an expansive but well-thought-out bestiary, where no creature feels generic and everything calls for distinct strategies to defeat them.

This is in Early Access, but the visual and interface polish really is there. Card text dynamically changes to reflect modifiers affecting how much damage or block you’re dealing, tooltips are smart and informative, doing a great job of explaining mechanics on the fly without issue. The game’s visual style is a surreal, fun interpretation of high fantasy.

There’s a third character, and thus card set, planned to come out before Early Access ends. But what’s really missing for me is more diversity of challenges and maybe some game balance. The spire is split into three chapters which are always the same—I’d appreciate some more randomness or variety of different zones, and I wish the game was longer, or that I had the option of a longer game with more chapters. I often feel like I reach the final boss just as I’m getting my feet under me in terms of having a deck I like. I want more time for the game to breathe and more of an opportunity to put together truly powerful decks. It feels like those mechanics don’t really have the space they have in a typical roguelike.

And those final fights are often anticlimactic. Many of the fights in chapter three seem like they’re just unfair difficulty spikes. Slay the Spire rests most of its randomness on the positive goodie-bag randomness of loot drops, and on the 'natural' randomness of the card deck. Enemy attacks deal fixed amounts of damage, and enemies have mostly established behavior patterns, so 'bad RNG' is not as much of a frustration as it is in most roguelikes.

This is smart, but it does begin to falter in the third section of the game. Your deck by this point will be very specialized—that’s the only way to beat those later challenges. But many enemies effectively counter certain strategies. Since you can’t avoid a fight or change what’s in your deck, you can feel like you’ve been put into an impossible position. Because the bosses that show up are random, this can get particularly frustrating.

If this genius, chocolate-on-peanut-butter idea of a game has a weakness, it s in trying to please two very different perspectives on how random a game should be.

One boss, for example, effectively punishes you for playing a lot of cards, ending your turn and becoming more powerful every 12th spell you play. If you’ve assembled the death-by-a-thousand-cuts deck, this becomes a punishing fight, possibly an unwinnable one. Some of these match-up problems are inevitable in a game like this, but the third act feels a lot like a sharp ramp up in difficulty exacerbated by the fact the game overall is a little short.

Everyone has a different level of tolerance for this frustration, and it is a tough balancing act for any game. Devoted fans of roguelikes encounter unfairness and being crushed by randomness as a fact of life, part of the thrill of their genre. But CCG fans often recoil at variance: see the perennial popularity in Magic of decks that are have middling win percentages against every other deck in the metagame; see the player backlash at random effects in Hearthstone cards. If this genius, chocolate-on-peanut-butter idea of a game has a weakness, it’s in trying to please two very different perspectives on how random a game should be.

This is one of those games that very, very clearly knows what it wants to be and how to achieve that. Every mechanic is here for a reason and makes perfect sense in its context. If it needs balance tweaks, or if I wish there was more of it, those are gripes. And gripes aside, I’m not done with Slay the Spire at all, even after it ate my weekend. I’ve still to beat one of the final bosses, after all. I’m pretty sure when I finally nail the perfect iteration of the Ironclad Exhaust deck, I’m going to get there.

Slay the Spire is available on Steam now.

Jan 24, 2018

Bonkers-looking arcade shooter Pawarumi coming this month

PAWARUMI

Pawarumi is a "retro futuristic sci-fi pre-Columbian" arcade shooter that launched on Steam Early Access last October. At the time, small French indie developer Manufacture 43 said it expected to remain in Early Access for two to three months. It sounds like they were right: Pawarumi will officially release on January 30, the studio announced today.

Neo-Aztec is probably a more useful descriptor here. Basically, Pawarumi imagines a world where ancient civilizations not only didn't die off, but advanced a branch of technology built on light and gravity rather than, say, electricity and steam. Hence the neon-lit stone ships plowing through ancient-looking temples.

"Through their technology and their wisdom, they managed to make contact with three ethereal and much more powerful beings," Pawarumi's site explains. "Those deities took physical [form] in the shape of a serpent, a condor and a jaguar, and gave them free access to their infinite energies."

The oddball setting ties directly into the core systems. The serpent, condor and jaguar gods manifest as your ship's three main weapons—a spread shot, a laser, and homing missiles respectively. The rechargeable super attack combines all three into a screen-wiping assault.

Weapons aside, the core of Pawarumi's combat is its 'trinity mechanic.' Taking cues from Ikaruga, Pawarumi's enemies are also assigned a deity, meaning the weapon types you use will yield different results.

Manufacture 43 says the trinity was also inspired by rock-paper-scissors, and it shows. In crush mode, you deal more damage. In drain mode, you charge your super attack quicker. And in boost mode, you refill your shield at the cost of buffing enemies. It sounds like a fun way to liven up traditional shmup action, and it's especially interesting in an age where indies are fighting to keep arcade shooters alive.