Reviewer: Dos-Games-Online
This is a side-scrolling space shooter, with very small ships! As you travel through the region, your job is to destroy other ships. There are a wide variety of missions and ships.
Compared to other space shooters, this is hard, a bit confusing, and somewhat hard to control.
Reviewer: 10Kan
This shoot-em-up is very amenable to fusion with other video game genres; there have been shooter-rpgs, shooter-puzzles, shooter-strategies, and some of them have worked pretty well together. PixelShips may be the strangest combination yet. It's a shoot-em-up mixed with Pokemon. Most of the standard features of a space shooter are included, along with the tropes of a monster-collecting game.
This is how it works: you begin by selecting one of three relatively puny vessels, enter a campaign number, fly the missions generated for that campaign number, and then choose a new campaign. As you complete missions and shoot down enemy drones, your ship gains experience, and when you have enough you can upgrade it into a new, superior vessel. While you're in these missions, you're likely to be attacked not only by standard cannon-fodder enemies, but also by other full-fledged pixelships. Win a duel with one of these and you have the opportunity to vacuum up its scattered pixels, learn its stats, and add it to your own fleet! This is the point of the game; capture and upgrade your way to complete your pixelship database and unlock the final campaign.
The game's graphics are intentionally low-resolution. All the ships are no more than 9x9 pixels in size. The 160 pixelships vary greatly in looks, from the well-designed to the ugly, but their size keeps them from becoming too obtrusive. The backgrounds are another story, and add to the challenge in the game. While many backgrounds are just plain black space with stars, the earthlike planet with its cyan skies and the nebula with its green haze can make certain ships and shots difficult to see. The weapons themselves are the game's graphical high point. They're bright and colorful, leaving shimmering trails and satisfying low-res explosions in their wake.
The challenge offered by PixelShips is variable. The first digit of the campaign number determines its difficulty, but so does your decision of which ships to take on a mission. The armaments, armor, speed, attack power and recharge rate vary wildly among the ships, and some will be very difficult to keep alive long enough to upgrade. On the other hand, whatever your style is for playing space shooters, there's probably at least a few ships that work particularly well with that style. To actually win, you're probably going to have to fly most of the ships at some point, including the weaker, more challenging ones. One thing that adds to the challenge is inertia; none of the pixelships can stop on a dime, so some of the faster ones require a light, steady hand on the controls to keep them from bouncing all over the screen.
If you have some skill at shoot-em-ups and you also happen to find catch-em-all games really addictive, PixelShips should be two great tastes that go great together, if you don't mind the occasional ugly background and ship.
Download PixelShips (pixships.zip)
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