ANDears before Star WarsVideo game designers had begun to explore galactic dogfights. By 1962, Spacewar!the first formal computer game, was a rudimentary but influential attempt: two narrow triangles spun around the gravity well of a star, launching torpedoes at each other. After establishing the first principles of the medium, hundreds of developers attempted to refine and perfect the genre, which waxed and waned in fad but never entirely disappeared. Swan It is, perhaps, the greatest production attempt yet, a debut of A small Scottish study which answers the unlikely question: what would have happened if Steven Spielberg had directed? Space Invaders?
A lone fighter who roams an alien planet attacking flocks of UFOs and purple space jellies that drift across the screen. Stylistically reminiscent of the classic polarity-shifting arcade game. Ikaruga, Swan is a masterclass in technology, as your spaceship hovers over distant robot battlefields, rocked by the explosion of thousands of fireworks. An orchestra, sometimes frenetic, sometimes melancholy, provides complementary accompaniment to the action, which ebbs and flows with moments of respite between bursts of activity.
Enemies can fly through the air or glide along the ground far below. You must switch weapons to focus your attacks on either set of targets. Every few minutes you face a much larger enemy and must dodge their blows and lunges while compensating for the angle of your attacks. Enemies drop clusters of power-ups (which are lost, one by one, each time you take damage) that can be shunted between your shield system or your weapons system, a somewhat fiddly layer of complication that adds further strategy.
The game presents a formidable challenge and most players should start on the easiest difficulty setting, where laser bullets fall like rain instead of hail and you have a modest reserve of lives that replenish between each of the game’s seven remaining stages. It is sometimes repetitive and SwanThe new systems will no doubt be divisive among the genre’s most loyal and often conservative fans, but for those who approach it with an open mind and deft fingers, it remains an exciting sight.
