![]() ![]() There are the patrolling Imperial drones, which will lock onto your position if they are in range of the sound of your engines. Space is perilous, of course, but perhaps in more ways than you were expecting. Beam, your support officer back on the Axelios (played by Sarah Elmaleh) is a comforting presence. ![]() The voice acting throughout the game is outstanding. The trick is learning to match the response to the situation. It can be customised with different types of shot - wide-angled or tight-angled, freezing or burning - and once you clear the first clutch of stages, it becomes vastly more flexible in ways that it would be a shame to spoil. It can fly in all directions, boost away from (or into) danger, strafe, fire lock-on missiles and even leap over enemy bullets with a well-timed button press. As such, if you wish to triumph, you must learn not maps and layouts but patterns and principles. Galak-Z is a roguelike: the arrangement of each stage's items, enemies and asteroids changes with every attempt. While each stage has a goal (usually to destroy an Imperial satellite, or to move an object from one place to another), your primary task is hunter-gathering. Rather, pieces of idle space junk, either harvested from downed enemies or caches, which can be spent on buying upgrades for your own craft. No chests overflowing with gold or jewels here. As in Derek Yu's modern masterpiece, much of your time is spent burrowing into rock (in this case, vast asteroids, whose interiors are a cosy warren of corridors and chambers) in search of treasure. Galak-Z might share a general aesthetic with Gradius and the other classic arcade space shoot-'em-ups, but structurally and philosophically its closest relative is Spelunky, with all of the challenge that association implies. In other words, it comes to life not when you're laying waste a squadron of Imperial fighters to the sound of a Joe Satriani-esque guitar solo, but when you're trembling in the nook of some space cavern, health bar blinking on a sliver, wondering how the hell you're going to make it back to the Axelios mothership in one piece. But beneath the paint, this is, in Christian Donlan's enviable phrase, a catastrophe game. All of that can be found in 17-Bit's anime-inspired heroic space shoot-'em-up, Galak-Z: The Dimensional. An elegant, idiosyncratic galactic roguelike that recalls both the style and unflinching challenge of 80s-era Japanese shoot-'em-ups.ĭon't be fooled by the bragging, wisecracking pilot, the soaring Saturday morning cartoon soundtrack, or that evocative scarlet spaceship - the kind that has flown through countless boyhood dreams, turning aliens to green mush and asteroids to fine space dust.
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