"Little Ship Adventure" review: Zelda ship said

"Flying Barrage" has always been a fascinating and romantic genre. Flying a tiny spaceship through a sea of fireworks and defeating a giant BOSS several times your size is a very intoxicating experience.

But not everyone has been blessed with this experience -- the bar for barrage shooters has been horrifyingly high throughout history. Whether it is Konami's classic games "Saroman Snake" and "Cosmic Cruise Plane", or the "Oriental" series, the first of the "three Japanese fandom wonders", are known for their extremely difficult and low fault tolerance of one hit and death. The slightest mistake, the player will end up a "full of wounds".

This difficulty may be a relic of the arcade era oriented by the design of "coin rate", and after the arcade frame gradually fades out of people's vision, it should become more friendly with the changes of The Times. However, the playability and enjoyment of bullet-screen shooting games are directly related to the density of bullet-screen shooting - the fun of bullet-screen shooting happens to come from the "feeling of the rest of life" of avoiding dense bullet-screen.

As a result, manufacturers have to fill the screen with more colorful and dense bullets, and the threshold of horror is always high. As the author of the highly difficult hunting and shooting game "Angel in the evening", the self-deprecating sentence in the game is the same as "it is because of the guys who make such things, shooting games are gradually dying".

Very Hard, even "Easy" in "Angel of the Evening."

Because of this, when I first saw "Small Ship Adventure", I was actually quite scared. As a disabled player who can't finish "Contra" without opening 30 secrets, I am really not sure to survive in the high-intensity barrage of propaganda films.

Fortunately, as the title suggests, the game is not a traditional STG, and it is actually more focused on the "big adventure" part than the "Small Ship" - it is more like the classic 2D "Legend of Zelda" than the "Boss Bee".

Like the "Cartoon Link" that has no "the best sword in the village" at the beginning of the game, the performance of this small spaceship controlled by players is extremely weak at the beginning of the game - the movement speed is slow, the "heart container" has only three, no displacement means, no bombs, no sub-machine, and even the slow "bean gun" in the hand has only four body positions.

Not to put too fine a point on it, even the initial characters in The Binding of Isaac are much better than the little ship they're in right now.

In this case, of course, there is no talk of "suffocating barrage concentration" and "tense and exciting combat." At this stage, exploration and discovery is the main theme of the game -- find and press hidden buttons in the corners of the level, a hidden bridge rises from the otherwise calm water, and closed doors in the distance open slowly.

Before you can return, the door to the room you are in is suddenly locked by spikes, and several lurking "sweeping robots" jump out, forcing you to distinguish between them. When you can not use the "bean gun" in your hand to shoot these and you are almost weak enemies, only to find that their feet actually gave birth to a shortcut, straight to the floating bridge that has just risen.

This is where the game's "2D Zelda flavor" comes from, with combat and exploration being nearly equal parts of Little Ship Adventure. Even if you completely drop the barrage part and play it as a pure adventure game, you'll still get half the fun.

The map design of "Small Spaceship Adventure" has absorbed the essence of many Galaxy Demon City games, the trigger of various organs is linked, and the map itself has a strong connectivity - almost every organ is followed by a corresponding shortcut, and even the shortcut itself may have a shortcut to the shortcut.

In Little Ship Adventure, there is no such thing as a "teleport point". Every time you re-open the game, you need to re-run the map from the center of the "ship fire Sacrifice field", but the running time is reduced to the shortest by this shortcut.

Later in the game, even if you are at the bottom of the map, you can run to any corner of the map in just one or two minutes - of course, this is not to say that the game is too small. You know, in the process of clearing the wilderness, each pass requires you to unlock the ingenious mechanism, defeat the enemy who is guarding the important place, but once you reach the end once, the original poor mountain and bad water will suddenly become a smooth road.

Later in the game, you can also get "mark every missing point" item, easy to collect all

That makes Little Ship Adventure one of the smoothest games I've played this year.

As long as you keep up with the designers and are willing to touch every interactive object in the scene, you will rarely have to go back - unless you encounter a mechanism that requires some special ability to get through, known as a "mechanical lock".

The "vessel of the heart" of this place needs to be acquired after the ability to "walk on water" - yes, I know I am a spaceship

The special abilities required to unlock the "mechanic lock" are in fact the common "machine abilities" in STG games - acceleration, sprint, bomb, super shooting, time stasis, generator, plus a water walk. All the powers on this little ship, it feels right.

The basic skills point on the left side can be washed at any time, so that you can see the move

They act as "keys" to the map and levels, just like the abilities in traditional Galaxy Castlevania games, and provide repeatable exploration value to the map. You need to "speed run" to leap to the jump platform on the other side of the chasm, while "Super Shoot" helps you force through cracked walls and boulders in the way.

However, as a bullet-screen shooting based game, the role of these abilities is naturally not limited to the "key to unlock". Every time you get an ability, you can make a small leap in your combat power.

Early in the game, the passes leading to difficult areas were dotted with triangular enemies -- I used to call them "triangular arrows". They will not fire a bullet, but they will come at you after a short period of accumulation of force at a very high speed, with their initial slow speed and almost no chance of avoidance.

Even if you beat the "Triangle Arrow" with a wound for a wound, there are enemies behind the pass with thicker blood, faster movement, and more difficult to defeat - this is the game's "soft lock" way to tell you that this road is not possible, and maybe it is time to explore another road.

"Coincidentally," at the end of the other road, there is just the "sprint" ability to restrain the impact of the "triangle arrow". On the way to explore another road, the experience gained by defeating weaker enemies is just enough to raise your spaceship's firepower, fire rate, range and other values by several levels.

When you stand in front of the "triangle arrow" again, you will suddenly find that the strong enemy that once let you fight hard has become an ant that can be crushed by shooting a few bullets at random. The once invincible enemy behind them is now your equal.

That's what makes Starship Adventure so exciting -- exploration makes you stronger, and being stronger helps you explore. Unconsciously, the player will be in this "left foot on the right foot to heaven" cycle, sweep through most of the map.

As the performance of the body continues to evolve, the difficulty of the game will also increase, and the scenes such as "burst bullets", "laser beam" and "cross bullets", which are common in other barrage shooting games, will frequently appear in the game.

Although the barrage density of "Small Spaceship Adventure" is less than that of its peers in the arcade era, it is also a challenge for the new generation of players - especially in the case of fixed organs and a large number of artillery batteries on the same screen, the cooperation of "random number of bullets" and "automatic aircraft sniper" often makes people overwhelmed.

In addition to the body method of avoiding the barrage, how to distribute the limited energy slot of the small spaceship is also an important part of the battle. The blue indicators on both sides of the ship show how much energy is left, and both super firing and acceleration consume energy - you can use it all as a super bullet, quickly clear the clutter to reduce the concentration of the barrage, or use it as a "backup hidden energy" for high-speed maneuvers.

As for when to clear the screen with a bomb and when to slow down time, it is a cliche of STG games. All of the special abilities in this game are used in the form of charging, in addition to charging faster "bombs" may be used several times in a battle, the use of other abilities in the battle is quite limited, very testing the player's resource management ability.

Later in the game, it will unlock the ability to "get a general attack boost when full blood", an obvious nod to the "Zelda" full blood boost tradition

But as the difficulty mounted, so did the familiar problem -- frustration.

In general, high difficulty means that the player will face failure more often, and the game will become hardcore and heavy, especially in the field of barrage shooting, where the dead machine to zero is equivalent to deleting files.

Fortunately, "Little Ship Adventure" is clearly an exception.

In this game, the "failure penalty" has been reduced to almost non-existent, and small ships that are "covered with wounds" will not lose any experience and money, nor will they lose their firepower level, but will be revived at the most recent save point.

If you are challenging a difficult BOSS, there is usually a save point at the door of the BOSS room that leads directly to the battlefield. Even if you die in the middle of your exploration, there will be a shortcut to get back to the same place and quickly return to flow.

As a result, the "sense of repetitive work" and frustration caused by mistakes are also reduced to a minimum - just like when you challenge a difficult level in "Blue", although the possibility of failure is very high, the cost of retry is infinitely low, and the process of practice makes perfect is accelerated to the extreme.

Nowadays, many manufacturers use the high penalty for failure and the "three hundred and sixty-five miles" as gimmicks of the game, and even as a symbol of "hardcore", forcing players to discover the so-called "wisdom" from each suffering. On the other hand, Smallship Adventure, a bullet-screen shooter with a hardcore nature, breaks new ground in terms of player-friendly experience -- which, I have to say, is really interesting.

You can even turn on "Invincible Mode" and "change gears" in the built-in modifier.

But let's be honest, "Little Ship" isn't perfect. Limited to the development cost and experience of the factors, there are still many regrettable problems in the game - such as the short process, the hiding location of some items is too hidden and obscure, the proportion of exploration in the late process, the reuse of enemy material and other problems, are objective.

However, for a small indie game developed by two people, these almost excoriating "glitches" are a kind of sweet annoyance -- after all, when the game's relaxed and minimalist exterior reveals a hint of 2D "Legend of Zelda" charm, it is doomed to Smallship Adventure extraordinary.