Assault Android Cactus+

A surprisingly fun twin stick shooter. It might look like madness when you look at the gameplay, but you very quickly figure out how look through it all. Heck even the multiplayer is good if you want to do share the madness with your friends.

It’s great. It’s plays great, looks great and makes you work for success without ever being unfair. I love it.

Tremendo juegazo, una joya completa y bastante divertido! Tanto diseño de personajes, gráficos, jugabilidad y dificultad están muy bien siendo un juego Indie, de los mejores que he probado!

One of my favorite games. It's the closest I found to Cannon Spike, and it's super polished. The gameplay is amazing and feels great, with a scoring system that rewards mastery for those looking for it. If you ever want to play a twin-stick shooter with environmental navigation, think no further and get this game.

The following is a transcript for a full video review (available on YouTube) I did of this game: I am extremely pleased to cover today the 2015 indie title: Assault Android Cactus. Initially launched for PC platforms and ported to PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch over the course of the next 4 years, I've been playing this sorely underrated gem since I could get my no-hands on it. Imagine my surprise to learn that it was made by basically a three-man team called Witch Beam, located in Brisbane, Australia. And I'm just going to preemptively apologize because I'm probably going to pronounce their names wrong, per usual, but here goes anyway: Tim Dawson is credited as head artist and programmer as well as co-designer, Jeff van Dyck created all the sounds and music you'll hear, and Sanatana Mishra not only was chief designer, but was kind enough to respond to me bugging them for an interview. The story opens when Intergalactic Police Officer, Cactus, approaches the spaceship Genki Star, and is fired upon for her trouble. Reasoning the best entrance is a, uh, quick one, she slams her ship headlong into the cargo bay, where she meets Lemon, Holly, and Coral. Coral is not a plant but whatever. Together with Cactus, these make up the first 4 of the 9 playable androids in the game, with more unlocking as you progress into the game. Cactus then learns that the core ship is being taken over by a rogue AI and their only hope is to traverse an army of berserk robots and a journey over 3 kilometers long to get to the core and find out what's gone wrong. Along the way they'll encounter tricks, traps, enemies of all types, and unexpected rivals and allies! First off, this game looks AMAZING. Seriously, I cannot say enough nice things about just how GOOD this game looks! Even in the intro cutscene, there's textures across Cactus's armor... Armor? Or is that her body? Never mind, not thinking about it any further. Anyway, everything just looks polished – literally and figuratively. Since the game takes place on a spaceship, the things that are supposed to be metallic have this lustrous sheen to them. The androids – gynoids? Whatever – look very cute, very much inspired by anime of similar styles. They all have this cute big-head, super deformed look about them which definitely gives them an endearing quality. And the animations are silky-smooth, enemies and heroes alike. They're just so cute! I just want to protect them! Especially Holly, but that's just me. Look, they even made her armor green and her hair red, like the plant! That's a super nice touch. And the sound design is out of this world. I adore the OST in this game. It has this really up-tempo, kind of aggressive rock-techno fusion. Honestly, I wish I knew more about music because the soundtrack in this game is SO GOOD! It's precisely the sort of thing that cute android girls shooting up evil robots should be set to. And since all the characters use guns or gun-like things at least, the sound effects are REALLY good too. It gives the already fast-paced game a sort of feeling of “you want to go fast because it's fun to go fast” kind of vibe. Mechanically the game is fundamentally a twin-stick shooter. You move with the left stick and aim with the right, firing by holding the right trigger and swapping to your subweapon with the left trigger. If I were to issue complaint, it's super weird to me that every single D-Pad input acts as the “Back” button, even in the menus. But that's such a tiny nitpick. The overall gameplay is super fast, as I've implied about a dozen times now, with your android girl of choice moving across the maps and shooting everything that moves and a few things that don't. The caveat that makes this really interesting to me is that just taking damage and getting knocked out is NOT the end of your run. Instead, you're on a timer, represented by the androids's batteries. So, as long as you HAVE energy, you can get back up again and resume the level from where you got knocked down. Therefore you progress primarily by destroying enemies and collecting power-ups, like temporary options that fire when you do, wings that make you run fast, an emergency shutdown that deactivates all nearby enemies and lowers their defense, and lastly, battery extenders to keep you alive and going. The game is broken up into about 25 main levels across the campaign mode, broken up further by larger-than-life boss battles, each with numerous phases where their tactics change. I adore these in particular as a pinnacle of the game's masterful design, but even a regular level is still both a feat for the eyes and for the gameplay experience. But the game hardly ends there. There's also the Daily Dive, where a generated challenge run awaits you. There's the fiendishly difficult 50-part layer mode, boss rush, and more. And since the game can be enjoyed solo or with up to 4 friends in local co-op, there's no reason not to find hours of replay and excitement therein. Very much recommended.

Nice Bullet Hell game. Lots of characters to unlock, each have their own distinctive weapons, and it has some interesting design choices. You have hit points and a battery bar that serves as your health, this bar gradually deplets as you play, so you have to be careful to go fast but at the same time, to avoid getting hit, because if you exhaust your hit points, you get stunned which makes the battery go down faster and faster. You also get a bunch of different power ups, some more useful than others imo. Like the speed powerup wasn't as useful to me as the turret power up that gives you two robots for increased firepower, for example There are issues as well. I feel as if a lot of the characters you unlock are gimmicky and tricky to play with, they're cool, but some of them change the way you play the game in radical ways, and they take time to fully learn, something that collides with how brutal the game can be. The title doesn't have difficulty settings, and frankly, it's quite tough, some of the later bosses took me a ton of tries and if you play with more characters, whether they're human or AI controlled, it becomes extremely difficult to beat some of the bosses because all of your team shares the same power ups and battery (health bar). So if a lot of the members of your team get hit, you get hit, if a lot of the members of your team die, you die... There are modifiers that you can unlock through getting higher and higher scores, something you achieve by not dying a lot, mantaining a high combo, and going as fast as you can. But this imo can get quite grindy after a while if you want to unlock some of the modifiers; there's some that simply alter your camera view, like one that turns the game into an fps; it's really cool, but quite expensive, and I couldn't even unlock it after an entire playthrough. It feels as if a lot of the modifiers and unlocks are hidden and are quite grindy to get because of the devs trying to artificially prolong the experience, and that's not good. However, having said all of that, I did have a lot of fun with the game. I enjoyed the effects, the modifier that let me play with AI teamates that disables the scoring system for reasons (DO NOT ENABLE THIS FOR THE LAST FIGHT IT MAKES IT EXTREMELY DIFFICULT) and overall, I really like the unlocks and even some cool bonuses you get after beating the game. So yeah, it's a recommend for me, despites some of its shortcommings.

This game is not gonna be something you sink a thousand hours into. It just isn't. What you get is a DELIGHTFUL twin stick shooter. Its VERY 2015 with goober characters and silly humor, you can run through the whole campaign in like two hours. I got the old version of this game on my xbox when it went free with games with gold and I do NOT regret buying it again on PC. Its just raw, silly, indie game fun. I love it and HIGHLY recommend it.

Un no parar de emoción, un ejemplo siempre verde de que el arcade es un género eterno y que el gameplay es rey. Uno de esos juegos que logran con seguridad introducirte en un estado zen nivel a nivel, y con un reto que parece no terminar nunca. Es variado, es adictivo, es todo lo que debería y podría ser, un imperdible.

História curta, cômica, e jogabilidade ótima para um replay com amigos, além dos modos extras (ponto para o extra de visão em primeira pessoa, muito divertido ver deste ponto de vista)