Throwbacks are nothing new in the world of video games, and to say that they're expected would almost be an understatement. Indie games are almost always the most notorious perpetrators of this, for good or ill. Herein lies the game of today review, TeraBlaster, an arcade/Atari style shooter by. It's a game that you've probably played before in some shape or form, but it is still a fun ride into gaming's past nonetheless.

TeraBlaster has you controlling a small blue spaceship, shooting red space ships of varying sizes to an ear-throbbing loud techno beat. Even if you turn the volume much lower, the sort of music TeraBlasterpumps in the background gets you excited for your mission: destroying all enemy ships. It actually resembles a lot of modern club music and by that, it thumps aimlessly in the background trying to generate a certain mood while you just continue to do what you're doing in the foreground. It's both extremely noticeable in the sense that it's downright headache inducing at times, or it ends up as white noise after a while.

If that synopsis seems familiar to you, you may not be surprised to find that this game in many ways resembles Space Invaders and Asteroids; both games were simple in design, but got increasingly difficult as time went on,and the same can be said for TeraBlaster. It becomes harder and harder to stay alive as more and more enemy waves jettison towards you from across the small map. But beware, enemies aren't the only things that can kill you and cause your ship to have an introspective crisis with random quotes, from films like Fight Club or American Psycho. You can also be killed by explosive red boxes if you don't get out of the way in time, they function like red barrels in any other shooter game, though not made nearly as obvious as you're frantically flying across the blue grid like background. The grey boxes are for unlocking certain power ups like speed-ups, bombs and things of that nature. For some reason there's also a “Juiced” system that activates giving the player an area of effect explosion that clears the board of all enemies while you're hiding behind the fallen pieces of the grid. This is actually the best part of the game because it makes you actually think you're in another world, immersing you in this confined war-like setting. In many ways it resembles the film Tron, giving the player a sort of “We are locked in the grid” sort of setting, adding more atmosphere to what they're doing. If there's one thing the game does well, it's the atmosphere, which makes up for what can be an overall lackluster set up.

TeraBlaster has the same problem a lot of other shooters have, where you can keep the shooting button pressed at all times, spin your ship endlessly and essentially last for quite a while. The game goes from trivial to difficult in a matter of seconds at times, which makes the spin-and-spray one of the most viable strategies. One of the best ways to excel in this game is to commit to cheap tactics or to exploit the game's perceived weaknesses, which for some can be rewarding by figuring it out. At the same time though, you're only excelling because of an exploit rather than your own skills. This game isn't a test of your skills like Spectra, a game that I previously reviewed; it's just a test of “see how long you survive with our cheap mechanics.” Enemies can seemingly come out of nowhere, blindsiding you at a moment's notice. Even if you have the best reaction time you can have for games like this, things can spawn seemingly out of nowhere and just destroy you. For those who didn't grow up in arcades, they might not know about this practice but for those who do are more than likely reading this with a sour taste in their mouth. In old arcade games, cheap mechanics like this were programed into the game in order to force the player to give them more quarters and to lose automatically. This game has mechanics similar to that; the problem is that it really has no reason to have these mechanics, it's just out of nowhere something will happen and you'll wonder why it's doing that. At first one can assume it's some sort of bug in the coding, but no. It was deliberate to mess the player up. One can say they're paying homage to those sorts of games by doing this, but it comes off as more of a lazy way to up your play time and to get you to play longer so you'll “git gud” rather than excelling at the game.

What makes this game so forgettable is that it doesn't seem to have its own identity; it just takes parts of a bunch of successful games and goes from there. It even quotes random movies in an attempt to be funny or deep, but it just ends up as coming across as lazy and cobbled together. There was obviously effort put into this and the developers had a clear thought in mind when they created the game the way it is, but even as a tribute it needs to stand on its own in some way. It's just so easy to listlessly press a button and just fly across the screen; it will keep you entertained but only for so long.

TeraBlaster is a fun yet mindless game that tries to be so many different things that it ends up just being forgettable. That's not to say that it's a bad game, it's just plain wheat toast, it's filling for breakfast but has no flavour of its own.

Angelina Bonilla, NoobFeed (@Twitter)