Pixel Galaxy is the latest game from Serenity Forge and is a departure from their previous game: The Physics based puzzler Luna’s Wandering Stars. Pixel Galaxy shows some inspiration from score chasers like the amazing Geometry Wars, but it’s clearly a game all its own as the only shmup where you’re not doing the shooting.
Teamwork:
Pixel Galaxy has no story, instead it’s set up as a series of escalating challenges to see how long you can survive the bullet hell world of the game. The as mentioned twist of course is that you have no direct means to defend yourself from the sheer onslaught of bullets, lasers and more coming at you. Instead, you have the power to combine with any free pixels flying around the gamespace; wherever they touch your pixel is where they’ll be permanently affixed to your pixel.
As you collect more pixels and surround your vulnerable core with them, any pixels that were firing at you before will now fire automatically at their former friends. The more pixels and varied shot types you get the bigger and more powerful you become. Most pixels only can take one hit while shield specific ones can take five. All it takes is one crazy wave of enemies to have a massive procedurally generated mass of pixels to do your bidding.
There is an element of strategy with how you grow your pixel ship. Besides just rotating, you need to try set up attacking pixels at multiple angles to cover enemy patrol paths. If a lone pixel that’s connected to a bunch of other ones is destroyed, you’ll lose the entire group of them. The game is setup so that enemy shots will fill the screen and in many cases a big pixel ship will not be able to dodge them all, but as long as your core is alive you’ll still go on.
The size and damage output of your ship will changed drastically over the course of a play
About every 90 seconds of play, the game will unleash a boss to fight you and each difficulty level gets different bosses. The bosses are pixel ships like yours, but with special attacks and patterns. You can win either by attacking the core or just holding out for time to pass and then you return to surviving.
And that’s all there is in terms of gameplay, you can unlock a passive mode along with a boss practice and boss rush mode. For what’s there, Pixel Galaxy is an interesting take on the shmup experience, but it’s missing what made Geometry Wars so special.
A Light show:
The main problem with Pixel Galaxy is that despite the unique design, the actual gameplay is quite limited. Score chasers like Pixel Galaxy and Geometry Wars live and die base on the different challenges you can throw at the player. However, Pixel Galaxy doesn’t have the variety of enemies and situations that made Geometry Wars a hit. To be fair, the boss fights do mix things up more compared to Geometry Wars, but you’re going to be spending more time in general survival mode.
Despite not shooting directly, Pixel Galaxy definitely has the “bullet hell” part down.
Another point is what Geometry Wars 2 brought to the table and made it one of the best examples of the genre: Different game modes. GW2 featured a lot of different variations on its basic gameplay, with different high score lists and rules for each.
My personal favorite was Waves, which challenged you to navigate gates instead of firing bullets. Pixel Galaxy is limited in this aspect and I really hope that if they do a sequel or post release support, that they have more modes in mind. Still, for fans of shmups looking for something different on the market, Pixel Galaxy is a great variation on the genre.
For more on Pixel Galaxy, you can watch my spotlight video where I spent about an hour flying and dying.
