Indie Focus: Titan Attacks!

Space Invaders is a game that’s familiar to practically anybody, having long nested itself deep within pop culture, but while an arcade classic, it’s not really a style of game that is seen very often these days. That’s where the PlayStation release – PS3, PS4 and Vita – of Titan Attacks! comes in.

The game starts off just as you would expect, with you controlling a tank at the bottom of the screen, firing off shots and moving from left to right as you try to invade the sparse incoming fire from the aliens above. As they scroll from side to side, they inch ever closer to your tank, but at this stage they’re not particularly challenging and are easily dismissed just as a saucer flies by at the top of the screen.

The second stage isn’t much different, but as you keep playing and playing, the game’s ever-so-gradual difficulty curve starts to increase the challenge that you face. A handful of new enemies here, a slightly different pattern of attack there.

The presentation is impeccable, with chunky pixel art that calls back to the game’s retro roots and origins. However, despite the simplistic stylings, the game’s actually doing several rather nice things with the graphics.

The whole game plays out in a square in the centre of the screen, with the blown up low resolution backgrounds fading off to the sides, but across the whole screen are scan lines with the occasional signal interference-like effect, and the whole thing is distorted as though it were a bulging CRT screen – though this last effect can be turned off.

Personally, I found it really quite easy on the eye, with the graphics just settling into the background as you battle wave after wave of incoming enemies. Eventually, it did dawn on me that the backgrounds were gradually shifting and changing as I progressed from one wave to the next, which was a particularly subtle twist compared to the five different worlds that you pass through.

The set up is rather simple, with your solitary tank leading the counterattack against the aliens from Titan. The first 20 levels see you battling away on Earth, before you defeat a boss and move on to the Moon, then Mars, Saturn and finally Titan, pushing the aliens all the way back to their homeworld.

Just as the colour palette and backgrounds change to reflect the locations, so do the enemies that you will face. The aliens stop shuffling back and forth and start to attack in more interesting ways, sometimes bouncing around the screen or diving at you, other times swooping into the arena of battle in formations or coming straight down at you from the top.

Of course, they also start chucking a whole lot more bullets you way, to the extent that it’s near impossible to avoid getting hit once or twice every few rounds. Building up to a 9x score multiplier is particularly tricky when a single hit will wipe it out. However, you skin will be saved by the shop which appears between rounds.

With just a single life, you can top up your shields, increase your shot power, add to the number of bullets you can shoot and have on screen at any one time, buy bombs that will clear the whole screen in one go or add to your arsenal with add-on weapons.

It’s a fascinating addition, and it’s one that completely changes the way in which the game plays. Early on, while restricted to a single shot at a time, hitting the saucer that nips past at the top of the screen is a precise art, while the game is quiet enough that you can often spot and catch aliens that have ejected and parachuted down from their ship for a little monetary bonus.

However, by the time you reach Saturn, you’ll be kitted out with weaponry that you can practically spam the screen with as fast as your right thumb can manage. It almost removes the skill from proceedings, when you can go into each wave with maxed out shields, mash the shoot button for twenty-odd seconds and have wiped out the enemy, landing you right back into the shop.

On top of this, there’s a checkpoint system whereby you can load up a planet of your choosing, starting off with your best progress up to that point so far and continue on with your score attack. Fancy starting afresh? Fine, just kick things off on Earth. Want to feel like a ridiculously powerful badass? Hop over to Saturn or Titan and fire away to your hearts content, before looping around to play through all 100 levels with a fully kitted out tank.

Giving you an over-the-top challenge isn’t really the point of Titan Attacks! There’s still some healthy challenge there for those that want it, with the mid-point of the game and the boss battles catching me out on several occasions, but what this game really offers you is a finely honed and ultimately very cathartic way of whiling away your time.