Shoot 1UP

Every Thursday, I put a call out on Twitter for a classic Xbox Live Indie Game that could be a possible contender for the Indie Gamer Chick leaderboard.  This last Thursday, three possible candidates came out.  The ultimate winner was Protect Me Knight, a sort of action-based tower defense game that you haven’t seen my review of yet because I haven’t been able to play the game with three other players.  I didn’t exactly do my research on the game before buying it.  As a spoiler, I think it’s perfectly fine game that is not at all a contender for the list.  Expect a review of it sometime next week.

The runners-up were Leave Home and Shoot 1Up.  As it turns out, I already bought the latter when I started Indie Gamer Chick and never got around to playing it, so it became last week’s default winner.  And then I forgot to actually play it for a few days.  My bad.

Shoot 1UP is a space shooter of the bullet-hell variety and not a biography on Robert Downey Jr. set during the 90s.  There’s six worlds and three degrees of difficulty, plus a survival mode.  The gimmick here is that instead of having a wide variety of power-ups, the game spits out a ton of 1UPs.  Instead of building a stockpile of them, each immediately adds another active ship to your fleet.  If you play it safe, you can build an army of dozens, all on-screen, all at once, and all firing at the same time.  It’s original, that’s for sure.

Of course, in a game that’s themed around dodging a ton of bullets, you can’t always have your fleet spread too far apart.  You use the triggers to expand and retract the ships.  On the harder difficult settings, even a small extension will lead to you taking heavy losses.  If a ship is destroyed, you get a small shield from the explosion that will leave you briefly protected, so you shouldn’t expect to lose dozens of ships at once.  Ha, take that, Spain!

Unfortunately, I didn’t really like Shoot 1UP as much as some readers assured me I would, and it has to do with the overall design.  It’s awfully bland.  The backdrops, the enemies, and the bosses are mostly forgettable.  Sure,  there’s also what I think might be a giant space cock escaping an astrovagina and a big-breasted mechabitch that you have to perform a plasma-lasered mastectomy to, but it’s nothing that the Japanese haven’t already done before.  In fact, overall the design comes across as generic and trying too hard.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this whole "that looks like a gigantic space-dick coming out of a quadruple-cunted astrovagina" thing.

There’s some weird design flaws too.  After a couple of minutes on a stage, you’re given the option to keep flying forward or go into an all-range mode.  Even on all-range, the game still keeps you attached to rails, but you’ll be flying in different directions.  That sounds fine, except entering this mode somehow causes your bullets to not go all the way to the edge of the screen.  It’s bizarre, because when you’re scrolling vertically, your bullets do go all the way to the end of the screen.  The enemies are still at the edge, but they become untouchable unless you get closer and put yourself at greater risk.

Then again, maybe not.

I still recommend Shoot 1UP, because it is a solid shump.  But a leaderboard contender it is not.  The 1UPs building a fleet of ships that you control gimmick is unique and makes the game stand out in a crowded field.  At 80MSP, it’s a way better deal than the recent XBLA release of Radiant Silvergun.  On higher difficulty settings, the game’s six worlds do get longer, and the challenge is increased dramatically.  Yet it’s generic and bland and the gimmick isn’t enough to keep this from being totally forgettable once you finish.  If you’re a bullet-hell fan, you’ll likely enjoy this a lot more than I did.  Then again, you would also likely enjoy it if I dressed like a dominatrix and threatened to spank you, you sick fuck.  Besides, I don’t even like wearing leather.

Hey boys, that's not where that stuff goes.

Shoot 1UP was developed by Mommy’s Best Games

80 Microsoft Points never got more than 19 ships at once in the making of this review.