Project Root

Very nice game

This shooting game is honestly almost a hidden gem if you can get past some of the bad presentation aspects... It's a rotational free roam shooter that consists of 20-30 minute missions of varying difficulty. What I really enjoyed about "Project Root" was the kind of balance between "rush and shoot" game play and more delicate "rotate around the bullet" game design. You pretty much have to map the shooting buttons to the shoulder buttons on a PS/Xbox controller and use the sticks to move and rotate. If you don't the game will be unplayable on the later parts of normal and hard. I really liked that each mission had its own setup with unique bosses, objectives and even side missions. The radar is super useful (though there are some parts where you must shoot down a satellite to unjam it) and battles take place across land, sea and air. As you progress you will learn the different movement patterns of each enemy and this will help you figure out how to navigate some really tricky bullet environments. On some parts you can hang back, but in some areas the enemies spawn relentlessly, even during boss fights. As a result you have to "move with the flow" and time everything carefully. The final few stages are absolutely brutal on hard mode. The final boss in particular is a nightmare. Some levels have you busting off pieces of huge ships and others have you dive bombing bases. I would have liked a few more "base destruction sequences" but the big ship fights are a lot of fun. The in game graphics are great. You have sort of futuristic 80s arcade style army graphics. There are no aliens or creatures and you don't fight any land troops, just planes, boats, turrets, etc. There are some side missions and you gain experience for killing enemies. I really liked the "RPG like" progression since you could pick your upgrades (of course you want stronger bullets immediately), but it takes a LONG time to level up at the later levels so don't expect to max everything out unless you want to play this 40+ hours. I achieved 100% achievement completion in 17 hours. That included playthroughs on all each difficulty (24 stage completions total). The only achievement I missed was the speedrun one but I got that on my first try. Unfortunately, the updated version doesn't work, but the game has its own internal achievement manager that tells you which ones you've unlocked. You can either install an older version or use other means to unlock them on your profile, but you WILL get confirmation you've unlocked them since the in-game menu will tell you this. Aside from that, the music is good but not great and while the in game graphics are fantastic the drawn character models in the still "cutscenes" look utterly atrocious, though maybe that little bit of jank gives the game more character since it's obviously small budget. I personally loved playing through this and 100% completion was very satisfying. My palms were sweating at some points because of how long the stages are and it hit the part of my brain that loves to blow things up with precise shots absolutely perfectly.