GravArena

GravArena is a local-multiplayer-only arena shooter where you play as a spaceship and watch yourself and your friends die by flying out of the play field.  That would be okay if it was a Smash Bros style “knock your opponents off the board” type of game, but it’s not.

Behold the almighty space clusterfuck in all it's glory!

The blurb for the game promises “realistic gravity physics.”  I’ve never been in space, so I wouldn’t know.  What I do know is if you use your thrusters and travel more than halfway across the board, you’re likely going to fly clean off it no matter how hard you to try to swing your momentum in another direction.  The play field is too small for what the game wants you to do with it.  It would be like trying to land a Boeing 747 on your driveway.

If you can actually get used to the physics, you’ll still have to deal with the screen being spammed with various bullets and space anomalies.  You can add or subtract gravity wells and asteroids from the play field in the options menu.  Trying to play with these effects turns an already difficult-to-follow game into an unmitigated clusterfuck.  It’s as if they were trying to take the Michael Bay approach to game design: just throw as much shit out there as possible and hope it comes out coherent.  It didn’t.

The final killing blow for GravArena is the lack of online play.  Why this wasn’t included, I have no clue.  Maybe it was too hard to program.  Maybe they knew it would be next to impossible to find more than two people silly enough to actually buy this crap.  I don’t know, and I don’t care.  GravArena sucks so hard it can whistle from its own asshole.

GravArena was developed by Squire Software

80 Microsoft Points think Uranus should be renamed Urrektum in the making of this review.

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