After beating Retro/Grade once on one
of its medium difficulties, I was sick of it, and sat down to write a
nasty review giving it a low score. Before I began writing, I decided
to play 1 more level. Many days later, I am here writing my positive
review. Retro/Grade is different, and therefore takes some getting
used to, but once you fully understand it, it's pretty ingenious.
Retro/Grade is 80% rhythm game and 20%
shmup. The story begins as Rick Rocket takes out the last boss of his
final mission. You pilot his space ship during the last section of
the final fight. Once he defeats this enemy, the flow of time starts
to reverse. In order to prevent damage to the space-time continuum,
Rick must undo all of his actions and ensure that his enemies actions
are undone in exactly reverse order. So he must catch his shots back
in his guns as they fly back at him from the right side of the screen
and dodge enemy fire from the left side of the screen as it flies
back into the guns of his enemies. All of this catching and dodging
is timed perfectly to the game's music.
Your shots fly back at you in 2-5
rows, depending on the difficulty you choose. In order to catch a
shot, you must move to the row it is in and press cross when it
reaches your ship. At the same time, you must move out of the path of
enemy bullets as they come at you from the left side of the screen
and then progress back into the enemy ships' guns. You must be in a
different row when these shots reach your ship. If you fail to catch
a shot back in your gun or if an enemy bullet hits you, then events
have been changed and the space-time continuum is damaged. Space-time
has a health bar in the upper left side of your screen, and if it is
depleted, then space-time has been altered too much and collapses,
causing a game over.
Enemy fire can contain
power-downs, such as score penalties and temporarily disabling your
retro/fuel (explained in a minute, don't worry!). There are a few twists on this basic formula as well,
such as bosses with melee attacks and gravity bombs, and rapid-fire
missiles and sustained lasers you need to catch with your ship. The
game also puts its basic mechanics through their paces. Harder levels
are a dense maze of enemy fire and a complex pattern of friendly fire
coming at you from two directions at once. Some patterns also play
with your expectations, sending waves of enemy fire at you that make
you move in bizarre patterns that don't make sense if you were just
trying to catch all of your fire. When moments like this match up
with the music perfectly, the results are magical.
Some of your shots contain power-ups,
such as a shield that protects space-time from damage, multiplier
boosters (which ups your points multiplier by a few levels (normally
your multiplier builds up slowly as you progress without making a
mistake)), overthrusters (this is a power-up that temporarily doubles
your multiplier. You activate it by pressing R1), health for the
space-time continuum, score bonuses (your score starts high and goes
down since time is reversed!) or retro/fuel refills. Retro/fuel is
the mechanic that really sets this game apart from a lot of other
rhythm games in my opinion. You have a retro/fuel meter that you can
drain at any time by holding down circle. As long as it is held down,
time reverses. Well actually, time is already reversed, so time moves
forward. So if you make a mistake or are about to die, you can use
retro/fuel to rewind the level a bit and try again. If you get a game
over and still have retro/fuel left, you can rewind out of the game
over screen and back into the level to go at it again. This mechanic
really lets you wrestle with the game's levels in a way that most
rhythm games don't. Even if you are on a level that is really hard
for you, if you use your retro/fuel intelligently, you might have a
shot at beating it. You can use it to go back and get power-ups you
missed, for example, allowing you to continually heal up after your
mistakes. A lot of rhythm games seem to demand perfection and that's
it, but retro/fuel allows you to make mistakes but then wrestle your
way through a level.
Another way that this game
differentiates itself from other rhythm games is in the music
department. You'll remember that I dinged Patapon for not have enough
good music. Retro/Grade does not have this problem. It's electronic
music soundtrack is one of the best in gaming. If your into that type
of music, it's very much worth listening to even if you're not going
to play the game (the soundtrack is available on PSN). It's the kind of high quality electronic music I
associate with groups like Daft Punk and Justice: so good it makes
other electronic music sound lazy. Rhythm games often suck you in and
make you feel like you are part of the music. Retro/Grade does that
too, but it's music is of such high quality that the experience is
even greater than many other games. These songs will be stuck in your
head forever, and that's a great thing. Picking a favorite is
impossible. When I tried to think of which is my favorite, I'd play
through a level and say, “That's the best song.” Then I'd do
another and say, “That's actually just as good as the last.” Then
I did that again. And again. In all about five of the ten songs are
all equally in first place in my mind, and the other five are really
great too. Walking around at work, I sometimes imagine the whole
place lit up in the neon aesthetic of Retro/Grade, each
cubicle-dweller bobbing their head to the beat.
After you beat the ten level campaign,
which doesn't take that long, there are other difficulties to try
(six in total). There is also the extensive challenge mode, which is
a large map of levels you can fly through. There are over 100 levels
on this map. Each throws you into a level at a certain difficulty and
with some alternate rules. These can range from reversing the level
so that it appears backward to making all enemy shots have
power-downs to increasing or decreasing the speed (the music sounds
amazing slowed down or sped up!) to making you beat the level without
any mistakes or hitting every shot dead on (as there are a few
degrees of accuracy for hitting each note). This sounds like it might
get boring as there are only ten songs, but amazingly the little
variations the special rules add keep things fresh throughout the
whole map. Beating certain tracks of these levels will unlock secret
stuff, such as cheats (big head mode and level modifications), a
music player, concept art (including some cool progressions from art
to final models), and most interestingly to me, different player
ships. There's quite a few ships to unlock, including a bunch of cool
characters from other indy games such as Octodad and Super Meat Boy.
Much like Bit.Trip Runner 2, these other ships play the same but are
new characters with new animations; they are really to cool to unlock
and experience. Completing challenge mode is a lengthy process, and
the final stages are super-hard, but doable (and fun!).
Trying to get the trophies for high
ranks on campaign mode are the game's ultimate challenges. At their
worst, they require you to do perfect runs of the hardest difficulty.
After a few days of trying, I was only very slowly making my way
toward this goal. So I decided to go out in a blaze of fun and got
the trophy for getting the 2nd best ranks on the hardest
difficulty. If you are super-hardcore though, the perfect run
challenge awaits you.
Retro/Grade can be controlled with a traditional controller or a guitar controller. Months
after first publishing this review, my sister-in-law bought a guitar
controller, so I borrowed it to try it out with this game. When using a guitar,
you press the fret buttons to jump to the lane you want to be in and then strum
to un-fire your shots. The whammy bar controls your retro fuel, and overboost
seems to go off by itself whenever you get it. The guitar was fun to mess
around with for a few levels, and it's different enough from Guitar Hero or
Rock Band (especially dodging enemy fire), but since I learned how to play the hardest levels on a controller,
I'm not interested in learning all over again with the guitar. If you're
looking for another guitar game to play though, going through the game from the
beginning and learning how to un-fire and dodge shots would probably be a lot
of fun. Although I'm not sure how you would beat certain score challenges with overboost activating automatically. Unless my guitar is busted or I was holding it at too steep an angle, I don't understand why you don't activate overboost by tilting the guitar up...
Some of the harder stages at first
seem like they aren't possible to do with a conventional controller
and that they were made for guitar. But once I got a little more
experience with the game, I came back to these levels and was able to
do them with a controller. I've never mashed on a controller more
than I have on this game. The hardest levels are physically
exhausting to play on a controller. I mashed on it so hard, I could
feel the plastic creaking under the stress. At one point, I actually
had to quit in the middle of a level. My forearms were burning and my
hands refused to move. It reminded me of the way I mash on the
controller to play hard levels in Wipeout HD, only way worse. This
is, of course, really awesome.
I wanted to give a shout-out to the
vibration in this game. I am so used to vibration in games that I
often don't notice it. You would expect the vibration to just be a
steady beat for a rhythm game, but this game's vibration sends subtle
signals to you that actually match the notes rather than just the
tempo. It's doesn't vibrate on every note, just a subtle buzz here or
there that matches what you are hearing. It's really the first
innovative use of vibration I've seen in many years, so kudos for the
polish on that.
Kudos to the polish on everything in
the game, actually. If you've read anything about the game's
developer, Matt Gilgenbach (
check out this Polygon article), you know
that he worked really, really, really hard on it, and it shows. With
a few little exceptions, it runs like a dream. There are no loading
times, and the graphics are stunning. The attention to detail in
the graphics and interface are really remarkable. Much like Wipeout
HD, the backgrounds are crazy detailed and gorgeous looking even
though you will never have time to look at them. Check out the way
the lights on the ship and stuff in the background and shots all
flash to the tattoo of the level. Check out the shadows the boss casts
in level 4 or the stunning sunrise in level 8 (which is actually a
sunset in reverse!), or the textures on the big-head mode versions of
the ship pilots. The story is minimal, but the level descriptions and
song names are all clever/hilarious. I know Mr. Gilgenbach says he
made some mistakes with his priorities and work ethic (basically he
felt he neglected his wife a bit during development), but his hard
work shows. I wish him all the best in balancing development of his
new game Neverending Nightmares and his family life.
Once you get used to Retro/Grade's
high concept and slight spin on traditional rhythm gaming, it becomes
an addictive and wonderful experience. I don't know how the idea for
this game was thought up, but it works brilliantly. The music is the
real clincher. The seriously excellent soundtrack would make even a
bad game worth playing. Fortunately the mechanics and feel of the
game, and especially the retro/fuel system, are really good too. I
kind of don't like rhythm games too much because they just tell you
what to do and you have to do it exactly, but I loved Retro/Grade.
It's a great game, tier 2.
