PixelJunk Sidescroller Playtest: Retro Futuristic Shooting

Pixeljunk Sidescroller opens on a prompt to “insert coin” on a display designed to replicate arcade cabinets of old, complete with a bowed screen and scan lines. However, the retro aesthetic stands in stark contrast to the modern, bass-heavy music pulsating under the main menu. I don’t often spend much time on menu screen, but this one gave me pause. The music sounded almost sinister compared to the simplicity of the menu (which claimed to be copyrighted in the 26th century).

It’s not unpleasant by any means, but it was odd to hear modern music combined with the vintage art direction. This combination of retro and modern permeates the entire Pixeljunk Sidescroller experience.

Sidescroller is a horizontally scrolling shooter in the Gradius mold. It’s the standard fly forward, shoot some enemies, collect power ups, fight the boss at the end of the stage skeleton that shmups have been using for years. However, while many shooters would end their stage with the boss fight alone, Sidescroller always contains a very intense escape from its “Sectors,” generally with thinner corridors to navigate and more of the stage’s specific environmental traps. This is the first of a few differences from the classic shmup formula that give the game its own identity.

Your ship is equipped with three weapons that can be swapped between at any time: the standard machinegun, a powerful laser, and (my personal favorite) the bombs. At level 1, the bomb fires two bombs up and two bombs down. These seem to have some special gravity applied to them, since the bombs fired upward bounce along the ceiling as the downward bombs bounce along the floor. All of the bouncing is the result of Q Games’ fancy physics engine from Pixeljunk Shooter, and can therefore be manipulated by the way that you’re moving when you fire the bombs.

Bouncing bombs over a ledge to take out a particularly annoying enemy that you can’t reach with your other weapons is incredibly satisfying, and I’ve never used a weapon quite like it in a shmup before.

Each weapon is distinct, and must be leveled up individually. Each powerup you find will increase the amount of firepower the weapon has. After a couple of upgrades, the machinegun fires in front of and behind your ship in six different directions. The laser does more damage than anything else in the player’s armory, even without any upgrades, but it fires at a very deliberate pace. I like the fact that the lasers can also be used to burn through ice, especially since clever usage can make levels much easier than they normally would be. While the game never tells you about this outright, it’s nice to be rewarded for creativity.

There’s also a spin attack that has to be charged up, and while it destroys nearly anything it touches, you have to be careful not to steer the quickly-moving ship into bullets. My ineptitude made its usage infrequent, but it did get me through a couple of challenging areas (but more on that later).

Unlike most shmups, Sidescroller uses a checkpoint system. This frustrated me quite a bit at some points, since a single death could send me back pretty far in the stage (bear in mind that the checkpoints are similar to item pickups, and can be missed), and would reset my score to what I had when I flew through it. Lose all your lives, and you’ll be given a chance to continue (resetting your score to zero, but returning you to your last checkpoint), quit, or continue on casual difficulty.

This nearly made me give up on the game.

There’s a point in Sector 1-3 that covers the walls with ship-destroying lava (generally the ship can touch the walls and floors without harm) and makes you dodge attacks from three bullet-fanning enemies, one of which has blue highlights. These special highlights mean that an that an enemy will drop a power up when they die but take longer to kill. Navigating through the bullet fans in order to destroy each of these three enemies required a steady hand, and I often found myself backing into the lava and dying instantly.

Of course, with each death, I’d have to restart from the checkpoint, fight through a corridor full of enemies, and wind up in the same dangerous room.

Since the game only allows you to take two hits before dying (although the first hit overheats the ship and can be healed by submerging your ship in water or going under a waterfall), this extended path I had to take to get back to the room often resulted in entering the death room while damaged. To top it all off, after the first three bullet-fanners are destroyed, four enhanced blue ones appear. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time dying.

I wasn’t able to clear this little area until I consulted with a friend via text and he recommended using the spin attack to get through there, since I could kill two enemies in one spin. Even so, in practically any other shmup, death would have only been a minor setback, as I would have re-spawned where I’d died. It took me about 40 minutes to get by this one room (this may have been due in part to my stubborn refusal to drop the difficulty from normal to casual). I reached a point where I almost gave up out of frustration. The combination of the retro difficulty and modern checkpoint system was simply wearing on my patience.

I don’t want to end this playtest on a negative note. After my prolonged struggles with 1-3, the game started to click with me. It was challenging, but the moments of success were elating. From taking down a giant fish that spews bullets and drops missiles from the sky, to an escape through a hallway made of rapidly closing pistons, to carefully navigating through flammable gas while surrounded by fire-spitting enemies, the highs made my frustrations with 1-3 mostly fade away.

Food for Thought:

1. As you switch weapons, pass checkpoints, and get powerups, a voice announces what’s going on in a very katakana voice. For instance, passing a checkpoint will be announced with a “chekku pointo!”

2. I mentioned it a little bit in the opening to the playtest, but the game’s music is very good. Strangely jazzy and mysterious, which is quite a bit different from the games that seem to have inspired it.

3. Given that the game is so arcade inspired, it’s kind of a shame that there’s no way to reconfigure the controls to make it more playable on an arcade stick. The fire button is R1 and the weapon switches are square and circle, which makes arcade stick usage awkward.