Riff: Everyday Shooter

Written by Tom Clare in PS3 Game Reviews, Sunday 11 January, 2009

Released: 2007
Developer: Queasy
Genre: 2D shoot 'em up
Version: 1.00

Everyday Shooter is one of the more inventive Robotron clones to have emerged over the last few years, with attractive presentation mixing it with inventive, retro-themed gameplay to largely good effect.

The action is very simple; you control a small, square-shaped ship, manoeuvring with the D-Pad and shooting in any of eight directions with the face buttons (though you can opt for the sticks if you're particularly retrophobic). The levels last as long as the music tracks that accompanies them, and your task in the three or four minutes is to survive and thrive as a barrage of foes come at you from all corners of the screen.

It doesn't provide the pure, adrenalin-charged high-score bliss as the games it was clearly inspired by, but it does in part make up for it thanks to a cluster of novel ideas that add fresh impetus on an old formula. It's testament to Everyday Shooter's design that no two levels play or look alike, which given the simplistic gameplay foundation, is quite a feat. Whilst the music isn't that great, the firing/destruction effects that produce additional notes to accompany the songs are a welcome touch. The graphics are good by network standards as well, with the intentionally ancient-looking front end belying the vibrant, racy in-game artistry that's pleasing on the eye.

Points are scored not in the conventional 'blast anything that moves' manner but by collecting squares left behind by defeated enemies, and how you get them varies drastically level to level. The opening level sees you facing dozens of red robots, which drop squares if caught in traps set by shooting power-ups; time it right with loads of enemies on screen and you're in for a massive points haul. Other levels see you having to blast the weak-point among a network of foes whilst also avoiding getting blocked into a corner, whilst perhaps most bizarrely of all, there's even a section that sees you shooting a giant cartoon eye - the more you shoot, the smaller it gets until eventually it starts to fire out those all-important squares.

And as a famed comedian may once have mentioned, points mean prizes - literally, in the case of Everyday Shooter. Refreshingly for a title so clearly rooted in arcade territory, it makes a decent stab at providing replay value, with the points you gain allowing for the purchase of such things as extra lives and some fairly standard additional visual effects. The enjoyment in pursuit of these treasures is rather curtailed by the extortionate costs asked of them though, as with only eight stages, continually replaying stages becomes a chore.

Not the first and by no means the last PSN Robotron reimagening, Everyday Shooter doesn't offer enough of the just-one-more-go factor to satisfy fans of the aforementioned classic, but for cleverness and competence of design, as well as the feeling its trying to do things differently, it's certainly worth a go.

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