Habroxia, developed by Lillymo Games, is a retro-style scrolling shoot ’em up, your single ship facing off against wave upon wave of enemies across across fifteen levels in story mode and three endless modes. There are power ups to collect, astronauts to save, and bosses to battle, all wrapped up with chip tune music and 16-bit graphics with a steady difficulty curve.
There we go, review done in one paragraph.
Honestly, there’s not much more to tell you. The game does have a few neat ideas, but none of them are brand new; the game sometimes swaps from horizontal to vertical scrolling mid-level, and there are three firing modes to use. Right trigger fires forward, swap to the left trigger and you fire vertically, while if you hold both together you have a spread shot. It’s a cool feature, but you rarely ever need anything other than the spread shot as enemies always appear in front of you.
You also have a boost, but again, it’s rarely required. I only used it once or twice to zip in and rescue an astronaut, and just two of the fifteen levels have you saving them as well as shooting enemies.
Along with the power ups you collect while playing, you can also pick up credits that can be used to permanently upgrade your ship. It’s a mechanic that is clearly meant to lengthy the story mode, as it gets quite tough near the end and you need a fully powered ship, but there’s a way to cheese it.
Credits can be found by destroying enemies, including some destructible blocks that make up part of the levels. Part of the boss battle on level eight includes walls of the these destructible blocks scrolling towards your ship and as there is no time limit on the boss, so you can hang back and farm the blocks for credits for a good few minutes before your stray shots eventually wipe the boss. You can easily rack up 400 credits in this one level, and as you can replay that level as many times as you want, four or five runs will max out all the upgrades on your ship to make the last few levels extremely easy.
Graphically it looks like something you would find on the Amiga or Atari ST, but the chip tune music got annoying pretty quickly and I had to mute it to save my sanity.
There are three endless modes for when you beat the story but the Rescue mode, in which you collect stranded spacemen, is rather empty and you will be scrolling through lots of dead space before any action occurs.
