Galacide

Galacide is a blend of a Match 4 puzzle game meets old-school shmup. It’s very well made, but ultimately fails to hold my attention even for the length of a full level. My limited playtime involves 3 separate times as I gave it another shot and beat a level… but always ended feeling the same way. Bored. (Despite the low playtime, I’m at the halfway point in the game) You control a ship in classic Shmup style shooting enemies and dodging their shots. Instead of terrain, walls of colored blocks spawn in the distance. Each enemy you destroy drops items that fire blocks of your own. Matching sets of 4+ blocks explode and clear a path for you to move forward. Theoretically, the core mechanics seem like they should work, but in practice, its oil and water. As a shmup, Galacide is extremely slow and claustrophobic. A relatively small number of enemies spawn in, get blasted by your overpowered weapon, and leave you to navigate whatever random path you were able to clear in the blocks. It has neither strong combat nor strong level designers that make each stage feel fun and exciting. As a puzzle game, I find myself wrestling with the controls because it’s just too cluttered. It becomes extremely difficult to get to the piece you need because your vacuum power clumps them all the colors together and the fire a block button is the same as the attack. If you’re not careful, you’ll block off your ideal path while just trying to defend yourself. This slow pace is made worse by long stages of repetitive gameplay. The general emotion loop I have is getting bored at the 30% mark, debated quitting around the 60% mark, and actually having some fun at the end stage boss. At that point I usually contemplate doing another level because it’s a short game… but realize I can’t do another 20 minute stage. It really sucks to be so negative about this game because the production values are top notch. It looks good, it sounds good, it feels functional and it doesn’t crash. But the core design just doesn’t satisfy either the puzzler or the shooter in me.