Galactic Wars Review – What if Galaga Was Side View, and Developed for the PICO-8?

In this game’s case, I bought it as part of a bundle that also included Galactic Wars EX. I was really curious about playing that game, but there was also an original version, too. For both titles I just knew them as side scrolling shooters and I liked how they looked. Before playing the follow up, I decided to play the original. Here’s a review of the original Galactic Wars developed for the PICO-8!

I also shared an abbreviated review of this game on YouTube!

Gameplay

Not knowing what to expect, I started up Galactic Wars. After a few moments I noticed that the enemies kept to some sort of formation, like a sideview Galaga. The game’s designed to be an old school arcade shooter where you destroy waves of enemy ships and eventually face off against a mothership at the end.

Before achieving that objective, you’re just trying to obtain the highest number of points you can. If you lose all your lives you start over from the beginning. There are no continues and no save states. It’s just quick arcade shooter fun.

Although the title shares the wave gameplay model of Galaga, it features multiple differences.

Along with moving up and down the screen, you can also move left and right. You can even move all over the screen.

Enemies appear on the right side in predetermined formation with specific attack patterns. About half of them move from left to right across the screen, but never move up or down. Others shoot off missiles, send out laser beams, and so on. For some reason, one makes me think it uses fart attacks against you!

Although it’s worth noting, I didn’t see any enemy doing swooping motions to smash into you. Some foes try to ram you, though!

There are different power ups to acquire as well. These are run of the mill, with the expected speedups, double shot, and spread fire available.

One of my favorites are the options that rotate around your ship. You can have up to three of them.

An initially confusing aspect of the game is that at the top-right of the screen there’s three bars indicating your speed. When I first saw this, I thought you could change your ship’s speed on the fly. That is not the case. Instead, you pick up lightning bolt icons to increase your speed. There isn’t a way to reduce your speed without being killed.

The biggest mechanic of the game is the fire power bar. It goes down as you fire your weapons, and once it is depleted you need to wait a second or two for it to refill enough to fire again. You cannot keep firing your weapons all the time.

Additionally, as you acquire more weapon powerups, the amount of fire power depleted with each salvo of bullets increases. Thereby forcing a give and take when it comes to using a high number of powerups versus relying on fewer weapons but being able to fire more often. I became used to this, but some may not like this aspect of the gameplay.

A big part of the game’s strategy is being able to predict enemy movements while you fly around the screen. Proper positioning of your craft is critical to avoid defeat. This sounds completely obvious, but in Galactic Wars I often found myself literally staying still as an enemy made its way from one side of the screen to the other.

I learned from experience that it was extremely easy to be killed from certain types of enemies if you attacked them head on too much. Instead, it made more sense to stay at a safe place while the foe went through its attack pattern. Eventually it would reappear on the right side of the screen, and if I timed my motions correctly, I could defeat it easily and safely.

Personally, potential players being OK with the game’s wave structure, fire power bar, and just standing still and doing nothing at certain times are key components to determining if someone likes this game’s mechanics.

Graphics

Having sharing a lot about the gameplay, lets move on to the graphics. Admittedly, this is somewhat difficult aspect for me to gauge.

Since this is a PICO-8 title, the resolution is extremely low. For those who don’t know, PICO-8 is a fantasy console that has specific limitations so that the games made for it remind me a little like NES titles, but with more animation and sprites on screen at once. However, the resolution is only 128 x 128 resolution and the number of colors on screen at once is just 16.

While it’s tempting to compare the game’s look to a NES title, I don’t think it looks better than games on that system. I’d rather refer to it as different.

Graphically, the best thing about it is the animation. When one of the enemies sends out its laser beam there’s particle effects that flies out behind it. Moreover, some enemies have great explosions when they are destroyed. The latter remind me of the fireworks effects found in Galaga ’90 from the TurboGrafx-16.

All in all, I enjoyed the game’s graphics a good deal, and mainly because of the animation. It is clear that the number of sprites and animation frames going on at once would be extremely difficult for the NES to reproduce.

Sound Effects

Likewise, the sound effects for this game are top tier as well! In fact, I think it is the first thing that stands out about it when playing it for the first time. When you destroy something, you’ll know it!

Over time you’ll even be able to tell what your bullets are hitting without looking because the sounds that are made are different for each enemy craft. Again, when you defeat something, the sounds of the explosions are great! When one of the missile launching ships is defeated, it’s a highlight both visually and aurally.

There’s only a couple of aspects that brings the game’s sound quality down,

• The first is that there is no music.
• The second is that some sound effects for hitting enemies aren’t satisfying.

However, neither issue is too big of a deal since the explosion sounds are so great. Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention those two problems.

Final Thoughts

Like I stated at the end of the gameplay section of this review, I think you need to be fine with a few gameplay design choices to really get into this game. The variation of gameplay isn’t that incredible, but for what it is designed to accomplish, it does it well!

Because two major aspects of the game are both impressive (animation and sound effects), I bumped the game’s rating up to very positive. I was going to rate the game as positive, but the graphics are good for the system and the gameplay can be very addictive as well!

Just know that this is an old-school kind of game, and it will probably be most enjoyed by fans of early shooters like Galaga, Space Invaders, and others. Those looking for a shmup in the style of a 1990’s release will probably be disappointed.

Title: Galactic Wars (Itch.io Page)
Genre: Side-Scrolling Shooter
Year Released: 2017
Developer: Volcano Bytes
Played On: Windows
Price Paid: $0.06 as part of a $5.45 Itch.io bundle
Regular Price: 2.00€ Euros

Remember, we can have different opinions about the games we play. If you like something more (or less) than I do, both of our perspectives are valid.