PolyGunR is a retroish style shoot em up on the Atari VCS from RetroNinja Games. I just found the demo of it on the Atari VCS App store, although I think it’s been available a little while already.
The demo will give you access to two ships to play as that have different play styles, and you can go through the first four levels.
Graphics wise, the game is really nice as a modern looking but retro inspired isometric shooter. I do wish you could use the second stick on the modern controller to rotate the camera view as sometimes when shooting something just off screen, it feels like it’s the camera angle that is stopping you from being able to aim properly rather than your inability to aim. I mean, if you can shoot from a distance, it feels a tad unfair that you have to get in closer and be at bigger risk just because your target is off screen…even if they’re in your sights.
Gameplay wise, this felt like an evolution of Asteroids. You can rotate your triangle-like spaceship around and then thrust forward in that direction. In this regard it played exactly like Asteroids, but unlike Asteroids which is confined to one screen, you are flying through locations and trying to activate switches to open gates and make it to the end of a level whilst enemy ships and gun turrets shoot at you.
I found I was crashing into the walls of the often-narrow corridors often, but thank goodness you don’t take damage from bumping walls. That would ruin the game for most if that were the case.
The demo features four stages, and going by the menu, it seems to indicate that these are four of nine stages that are currently shown to exist. I think this means the final game may have nine stages, but for all I know it may be planned for there to be more.
The game also has you level up your ship with experience points gained by playing the game. So, the quicker you complete levels or more enemies you kill the more XP it seems you get. Interestingly, the demo seems to show that you can access more ships and later stages by getting your ship to level 99, but considering I got it to level six, I don’t think I’ll bother to see what happens if I can grind my way up to level 99. It would be a cool feature if the full game was somehow unlockable for demo users who got to level 99 though.
The final stage of the demo introduces that the floor can become dangerous to fly over, and this ties into my concern with the controls and narrow corridors to go through that later stages could become frustrating if there’s too many environmental hazards. I’m sure if you put in the dedication you’d be able to master the controls and get through any hard or punishing levels that relied on perfect flight controls, but I’d argue if this were to happen it’d be a huge mistake. This seems a pretty fun demo, but I can already tell that it’s something I’d enjoy coming back to infrequently and zip through the game, rather than it be something I need to learn every pixel perfect turn on. I hope the final game is the former and not the latter.
You can find health pickups and sometimes get shield and rapid fire. The normal pace of shooting is quite slow, and I think this should be sped up a tad for normal fire.
The game feels a bit tank controlish where you rotate around to shoot. Of the two control methods I think the version where you have to manually thrust in a direction is the better. Even though this adds an extra control that you have to do continually to move, it means that the control stick can be used exclusively for aiming when you just want to shoot.
I did try playing the game with the classic style Atari controller, and I assume because it was the demo, this hasn’t been fully implemented yet. The demo still showed the graphics for the modern controller and didn’t seem to recognise that I was using the classic joystick. Also, my preferred control method didn’t work with the classic joystick. I could rotate the ship with the stick and fire, but I expected the B button to thrust, and it wouldn’t. It’ll be interesting to see how the game is optimised to the classic stick as you won’t have enough buttons for fire, thrust and dash anyway. It would be cool if it was sorted so that you could use the stick as a paddle to rotate the ship as this is a game that would benefit from this.
You can use the joystick with the other control method, but again, this is, in my opinion, the inferior of the two control styles.
The demo warns you that this is a pre-alpha build, so don’t expect this to be fully polished at this stage, but it is still fairly polished and completely playable on the four levels you have. The only sign of something that I didn’t quite like is that after completing a level it took you back to the title screen and then you have to go through choosing your control style and then select your ship and level.
I hope the final game will just give you the option to go straight to the next level after completing one, and then maybe also give you the option to change ship that you can choose to do. I don’t think you need to go to the ship and level select menu every time.
That’s going to wrap up this preview of PolyGunR, and it looks promising as a cool shoot em up, which may currently look to be console exclusive on the Atari VCS.
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