In the interest of full disclosure, we were given a code for a Steam copy of Vortex Attack. With that out of the way thoughl let’s get into it. Vortex Attack is an arcade space shooter, heavily based off of Galaga as the developer remarks on the game’s own Steam page. This lets you know more or less what the game is like if you remember Galaga, if not however, I’ll describe it.
Vortex Attack involves you, a lone spaceship, trying to survive in an area of space while enemy ships spawn in and fire at you. The main goal in each stage is to pick up the small white triangles that enemies drop when they’re destroyed. Once you collect enough on one stage the vortex on the screen will kill all the enemies and you proceed to the next level. Every few levels you face a boss, and repeat.
Being an arcade game the main point of it is scores, to climb higher and higher on the leader board. To this end the developer KaleidoGames is actually holding a tournament for the game, the World Championship Series, where the three best players on the leader board win prizes and there are four stages, the first of which is currently underway.
Overall the game is fun and can be tense when you’re trying to weave your way between enemy fire, it performs well and holds up with no problems. Unfortunately I just wish the game was a little more, well, more. The movement of the ships feels slightly too slow at times, though rather than speed it up I would probably suggest a side dash mechanic of sorts. Allowing the ship to suddenly dash to either side, with a short cooldown on the ability.
Similarly to this the ship you control, you only partially control. You can control the position and when it fires but that’s it, you can’t control the direction the ship is facing nor the direction you fire. At all times you face forward and fire forward. This feels frustratingly simple at times, you have this whole screen and you can travel all around it. Expect you can’t, because if you leave the bottom of the screen you can’t hit any enemies because they are now beside you rather than in front of you.
There are power ups that drop from enemy ships that help ever so slightly giving you a multi-shot spread when you fire, however even this spread is so tight that you’re still basically stuck to the bottom of the screen. Beyond this the only other power ups I found were a bomb, a little automatically firing orbiting assistant ship, and a number of orbs that just gave you a set amount of bonus points.
Overall what the game has is quite fun, I just wish there was a bit more to it. More mechanics like being able to control the bearing or firing direction of the ship (which would both be fixed by just allowing you to turn the ship and keeping bullets locked to firing ‘forward’) would open up more of the screen to play with and would make the game feel just a bit more involved. However, I’m not going to hold this against the game too much, because apart from that it’s a fun game and selling cheap on Steam at only £4.
Good fun with niggling problems and lack of long-term appeal
You can find out more about the tournaments surrounding the game here.
