March of the Flash Shooters

2-d shooters seem to have fallen out of interest for non-indie developers, which is a shame because most indie developers have no idea what to do, yet still get praised because idiots mistake gameplay innovation (and just gameplay innovation; the weapons and enemies are absolutely boring) for actual quality. Some common pitfalls include: characters so big you have to be psychic to dodge attacks, threats that move so slow you may as well be psychic, thinking that making the player try is optional, not playing the game to see if it's fun before going from gameplay to everything else, and hiring devs who are idiots (for the purposes of this pitfall, you can hire yourself). So, I suppose some merit goes out to Penguinz for not falling for any of these pitfalls but instead making its own, just for Penguinz.

By far my biggest complaint with penguins is the kickback glitch. I have no idea what causes it, but occasionally the kickback will neautralize usage of the left and right arrow keys in order to make you keep walking a direction until you hit a wall, in which case you stay there. Now, it's a shooter, and you can jump. Sure, the game gets a little harder when this happens, but it's not like I'm gonna start taking three times as much damage as a result. But, you see, the game insists that you go to ammo, health, and money instead of the other way around. This, in itself, is annoying since enemies tend to walk towards you and over their comrad's corpse while the arbitrary timer on equipment expires, but when combined with a glitch that prevents you from walking to it, you've got yourself an utter nightmare.

And actually, I take it back. The developers did need to play their game more, one of the pitfalls I listed. Then, not only would they realize that their game would be crap with the kickback glitch, but some of the powerups are useless. The shotgun and bazooka take up too much ammo to be of any use, but it's not like they're that useful anyways. The intended most powerful weapon, the chainsaw, isalso useless, since, uh, how to put this, it's not a gun? It's a melee weapon? Like the weapons half the enemies I'm shooting have? And I'm shooting them because of said melee weapons? The laser sight on the next intended most powerful (not sure if I've got that right. I also don't give a digit) is a completely useless upgrade (just watch where your bullets go, hectopascal!), which isn't a zetta big setback, but similar things repeat themselves on other weapons with upgrades being useless.

But maybe the devs did play the game. Maybe they're just lazy. Which is why enemies stop spawning from one side of the screen if you go to that side: They were too factoring lazy to make entering animations, so enemies can only spawn offscreen. Clever, no?

Each level takes place on a random arena, which sucks for bosses because now the devs don't know what kind of terrain you're fighting them on. Not that the bosses were that fun anyway, something that can seriously detract from a side-scrolling shooter in my opinion.

It's funny; whenever I review games that I thought were average, when I start listing their flaws, they start to seem below average. So what can I say about Penguinz? The attacks work. Which is more than I can say about bubble tanks.