Phobos Vector Prime Review

Eighties nostalgia is the main ingredient in Gunstar Studio’s Phobos Vector Prime, a twin stick shooter with resolutely old school mechanics, a synth rock soundtrack, and space marine J.L. Brown as it’s hero. There is a story which involves a shadowy corporation TFR and a fight for resources, but as the entire plot is relayed to you in a single paragraph for each of the game’s six levels and the odd text box in the corner of the screen as you’re shooting things, it’s a bit pointless. Point your ship at the bad guys and shoot; that’s all you need to know.

Your ship is equipped with one standard weapon, which is a rather pathetic blue laser, a shield which protects you from damage, a second shield which damages enemies when you run in to them, and a smart bomb that affects a small area around your ship. A slow moving missiles and a faster red laser are also available at times, but these have limited ammo and only spawn at certain points in the game. You also have an energy level which decreases when you get hit, but slowly regenerates which means if you are about to explode – and on the game’s easy mode you’d have to be the worst player in the universe to get to that point – so you can fly off to a quiet section of the map and wait for your energy to restore.

Unlike many other twin stick shooters such as Dead Nation, your ship remains locked to the centre of the screen and pushing the right stick rotates the level around you and it’s here we encounter the first problem: the scrolling isn’t smooth. It judders when you spin, not a huge amount but it’s very noticeable and very distracting to begin with. The view point is also weird as it’s not quite top down but at a slight angle. When combined with the juddery scrolling it did my stomach do a few queasy turns, it’s like having mild vertigo.

Your task as J.L. is to fly from one point in the map, shoot the spaceships, destroy the odd relay, and hack generators to unlock laser gates. Hacking involves pressing a button whilst hovering over the generator, so don’t expect any mini-games. There’s also a couple of sections where you must defend a certain point from attack, but since the enemy target you rather than what you are protecting, you can fly away from the defensive position and kill the enemies in a safe space.

There are less than ten enemy types, including the two boss ships, one of which is a copy of your own ship so it doesn’t really count in my book. You also have to destroy turrets and there loads of mines floating around being annoying rather than actually dangerous. The smaller enemies take a couple of hits with your laser whilst the larger ones have shields that need wearing down before you can destroy the ships and as you would expect, on the harder modes they take even more hits and do take a fair bit out of your energy reserves. Actually hitting a target takes a lot of practise, though. The controls are very floaty, so the best tactic is just to spam the general area of the enemy with bullets and hope for the best.

The six levels all have the same graphical design and include a fair amount of back tracking, and finishing the last level greets you with a “To be continued” message and that’s it. Game over. You would think that the harder difficulty levels would incentive some replay, but as there are no online leaderboards and you can get all the trophies including the platinum on your very first run through on easy mode, I can see no reason even to go and play it once that delightful chime of a fresh platinum trophy occurs.

There is a reason why the game seems rather muddled: it was never meant to be a single player shooter. Phobos Vector Prime was originally designed as a six player MOBA space shooter, with three different ships, different weapons and a different graphical style.  You can check out a trailer from ten months ago to see it was a completely different game back then. It does appear that the MOBA portion of the game will be patched in at some point, but I can’t find and details of when. They seems to have cut huge amounts from the game, and even the cinematics you can see bookending the trailer above are missing.

Despite the flaws, the game is relatively cheap at £7.99 and once you get past just how simple it is, it really is quite fun for the hour and a half it lasts. It does include one really neat idea, where hacking certain enemy hangars spewing forth a mini armada of ships which will now fight on your side. It’s a nice little twist on the old shoot ’em up staple of having an extra pod attached to your ship.

If you can be bothered to try the hard mode, it’s very challenging and does look pretty with plenty of garish 80’s neon lasers and pew-pew sound effects. In fact they’ve nailed the 80’s vibe really well, although perhaps not by design, as it’s so basic that the game does remind me of some of the arcade style games from back when I was a kid.

What’s Good:

  • Cheap and cheerful.
  • Mini armada of drones is fun.
  • A very easy Platinum trophy.

What’s Bad:

  • Juddering scrolling.
  • Unexciting weapons.
  • No reason to replay.

I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for Gunstar Studios. The game they ended up with is nothing like their original plans and you can tell this single player shooter has been created by hacking bits from their MOBA. Despite it’s many small flaws, it’s not a bad game, it’s not even dull, it’s just very rudimentary. A noble failure, I really wish I could score the game higher but sadly I can’t.

Score: 4/10

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