Everyday Shooter PS3 Review

     Nick Suttner of the Playstation Blogcast has said a few times on the show that real spoilers aren't necessarily the ones that ruin a game's story, but information that gives away the experience of playing the game and discovering things for yourself during gameplay. Everyday Shooter is all about discovering, learning, and experiencing the game's elements as you go, and is a perfect example of the ideas he talks about.

     Everyday Shooter is a twin-stick shooter. You play as a little square. The left stick controls your movement. Pushing the right stick in a direction causes you to shoot in that direction. Alternately, you can use the face buttons to control the direction of your shots. You can get diagonals this way by holding two buttons at the same time (for example, holding triangle and square makes you shoot north-west). And, as the creator of the game, Jonathan Mak, says in the in-game notes, I found the face buttons to be the way to go for controlling your shooting. I felt a lot more accurate using them. You can move while shooting, but you are faster if you aren't shooting. This seems like a small mechanic, and for awhile, I almost never stopped shooting. But then, as I learned how to play better, ceasing fire at critical moments to gain a speed boost became an important tactic. The square feels a little sluggish to me, and its bullets are kind of slow too. This was mildly frustrating throughout the whole game, but not a huge deal once you get used to it. Those are the only controls. Very simple.

     The game's complexity comes in its levels. In order to score points, you must generate them. They appear on the screen as small squares. You must physically run over them to score them. They follow you if you get near them, but only a little bit. It's not like they suck right into you if you get anywhere near them, you have to actually run them over. Some points glow, which means they are worth more than 1 point. All points disappear about 10-15 seconds after they are generated, so in order to score, you must generate the points and then get to them quickly. In each level, the method by which you generate these points is totally different, and only in the first level are you told how to do it. In most of the 8 levels, simply killing enemies will not net you points. You must jump through some hoops to actually score. This is in stark contrast with basically every game with a score system that I've ever played, and it is a big part of what makes Everyday Shooter so unique.

     Trying to figure out each stage's scoring system is fun and exciting. There's a sense of discovery in each new level, as if anything could happen. I'll run down the first level's scoring system for you, since the game explains it to you anyway. Basically, there are a bunch of geometric enemy types. One type will shoot salvo's of squares at you while the rest patrol the screen on a route (in other words they don't actually come after you). There are also these squares surrounded by floating pillars that will come on screen from time to time. If you shoot one of them, it will drift a bit in the direction you shot it, and then the pillars will open up and cause this weird lens flare effect. Any enemy hit by the lens flare will instantly die and leave behind a point, and also cause its own lens flare of varying size depending on which enemy type it is. As you might imagine, this can cause giant chain reactions if enough enemies are grouped together when you set off your first flare. If the chain reaction catches any bullets, they turn into glowing points. Shooting the lens flare also causes it to stick around longer and grow slightly, but it will always disappear after a few seconds. That's level 1. In level 2, you are doing something totally different. And then level 3 is totally different than both of them. Etc., all the way to level 8. I won't spoil too much about the other levels, as Nick Suttner would not approve, but in one level you duel with smart airplanes, in another you fight a single entity that generates tons of stuff, and in another you fight a fleet of troops that are built and generated on the fly. For tips and tricks for each level, see my spoiler post in the near future. By the way, my high score is 6520. Beat that!

     The game constantly pushes you to be aggressive to make your points. Being defensive will net you nothing, as just killing enemies to defend yourself usually won't get you any points. This gives the game a cool agrressive feel, but also leads to frustration if you die while trying to maximize points. I found that I usually got farther when I played more conservatively, but had more fun and got more points if I was really aggressive. More points per level anyway; I would die before getting to later levels.

     Each level lasts a certain amount of time. A progress meter creeps along the bottom of the screen. Each level is a song, and when the song is over, you go to the next level. This segues right into the music, which is excellent. I would call this game a music game in the same way Bit.Trip Runner 2 is. Everything you shoot and every point you collect adds a sound effect to the game's music. The music takes a little getting used to at first, as every song is just 1 electric guitar jamming. From what I understand, this is very literally true, the creator just jammed on his guitar to make the music for each level. This makes for a very different sound than most other video games. At first it might sound more like a demo tape than a game soundtrack. But man, once you get into the groove, it is amazing stuff. More games should have different sounds like this. It's one of my favorite game soundtracks. Each level is really unique and special musically, as is the title screen and transition screen songs. Jammin' stuff.

     The look of the game is something else too. There's a lot of stuff in the game that is in other games, like enemies, bombs, bases, and troops, but in many cases, they are very abstracted visually in Everyday Shooter. Enemies are often just shapes or blobs. Bombs and bases might be different types of shapes and blobs and colors. You have to learn in each level what things are, and often you can't tell just by looking at them. It's a really cool effect. Like the music, it takes some time to get used to, but it's great stuff. Being able to identify things visually and intuitively is often a hallmark of good game design, but this subversion of that idea is a perfect fit here. There are also some amazing, trippy special effects going on that really add to the game's abstracted feel.

     The game is very old-school in its approach, as you have to play the game through in one sitting, and you always start over from the beginning. The game is only about 40 minutes long from start to finish, but it is super hard, and if you lose all your lives, you start over from the beginning. Of course you can earn more lives by getting points. You can also buy more starting lives with your total pool of points from all your play-throughs. You spend these like money to buy more lives and visual filters and stuff. This loop of playing as far as you can, then buying some more lives with your points and starting over again is fun for awhile, but starts to get frustrating. This is because the game is really hard, and you will need to start over many, many times to beat it (at least I did). Losing a life is so painful, as each one matters, even if you have a lot. The amount of times you play the first few levels means you will get really good at (or at least used to) the first couple of levels, to the point where you might groan to have to play them again. That's why I highly recommend buying shuffle mode as soon as you can from the store. Once you buy shuffle mode and then unlock stages for shuffle mode use, this makes you play the levels in random order, which makes a huge difference in your experience with the game if you start to get bored or frustrated with starting over a lot. After many, many tries, I finally beat the game, although time ran out on me before I could kill the last boss. And then, even on level-select mode, it took me many tries and some internet tips to finally kill that sucker.

     Some of the things you can buy in the store are tied to trophy-like unlocks (this game is from the dark ages before there were trophies). Some have you killing certain enemies or bosses. Another wants you to survive one of the game's harder levels without losing a life. I wondered if I would ever get some of these as they seem impossible at first. But then, after repeated play-throughs, I got them all except for the one for killing the last boss in a whole-game run. It was a great sense of accomplishment to get these. Unfortunately the visual skins you unlock aren't very functional. They look kinda cool, but I found them too distracting to play with after a try or two and also not as great looking in general as each level's default graphics and effects.

     Everyday Shooter is a wonderful game of exploration and discovery. Sometimes I would discover a new way to get points or kill enemies in a level I had already played many times, and that is an amazing feeling. Unfortunately, frustration can set in after playing the game over and over without beating it. Shuffle mode helps a lot with this, to the point where it might have been better if it was the default mode, or at least kicked in automatically after you had played a bunch of times. Even with the variety that shuffle mode adds, I can still see the game being too hard and frustrating for many people. Personally, I was very much ready to be done as soon as I beat the last level, even though I hadn't managed to kill the last boss. Still, I had a great time with Everyday Shooter. So many of its design elements are clever, different, and beautiful. It's a great game, Tier 3.