Galak-Z recently made the move from PSN to the PC and I wanted to check it out after all the positive buzz it got. This shooter manages to combine rogue-like design with an elevated take on the shmup genre. It comes close to be an amazing rogue-like, but some design limitations do hurt it somewhat.
Season Pass:
The story and framework of Galak-Z is that the game is a take on the old school Saturday morning cartoons of the 80s: Where heroes and villains in brightly colored jumpsuits fight in ships and robots to control the galaxy. You play a pilot who survives a massive attack by the evil imperial empire; taking an experimental ship, it’s his job to fight back and save Earth from destruction.
The game is split between five seasons of stories with five missions for each. The seasons feature procedurally generated missions and story missions with random map generations to keep things from getting stale. Each mission has you flying into an asteroid or some ship to complete an objective and get out without dying. The season element comes into play with the game’s progression model.
Combat is fast-paced, yet requires a lot of strategy and tactical thinking
If you run out of health and die on a mission it’s game-over, and you’ll have to restart the season from mission one. After each mission, the game temp saves at home base where you can buy upgrades and view the next mission.
New to the PC version, the developers have an easier mode where the game hard saves after each mission, so that players don’t lose too much progress on failing. Once in a mission, Galak-Z’s interesting combat system takes over and provides very satisfying and challenging shump action.
Dog-fighting:
Combat in Galak-Z is an elevated take on the shump style of ship combat. You have full 360 degree motion for moving and firing. Your ship comes with shields and armor points or health. Take damage and you’ll lose shield points; when the shield goes out you’ll be vulnerable to armor damage which doesn’t regenerate unless you find supplies or buy items in the shop. Your shields will regenerate after a few seconds; allowing you to be reckless while still providing a penalty if you mess up.
Enemies work on the same principle as ships will fly around and do whatever they can to avoid damage while taking out your shields and armor. Throughout the season, you can find and buy upgrades to your ship and laser weapon. These upgrades will last until the end of the season or until you die; while unlocking upgrades to be purchased remain persistent over plays.
As the game goes on, you’ll unlock the ability to transform your ship into a robot for additional functionality and tactics. Tactics is a very important word as the game is tough. As one ship, you can’t really fight large groups of enemies and again, any permanent damage to your health carries over between missions and will cost you scrap to repair. You’ll need to use special weapons, the environments and even rival enemies to help thin the numbers to complete your mission. Having your upgrades be randomly found and bought through the season helps to force you to make use of everything in order to survive and makes it that much more painful if you die.
Galak-Z comes close to providing that skill-based gameplay seen in titles like Demon’s Souls, with the constantly changing world of rogue-likes; however the game’s framework and design don’t completely mesh to deliver on the endless replayability.
Sweeps Week:
Galak-Z’s season-based progression model and save system may rub fans the wrong way. After each season, all your upgrades, scrap and non permanent abilities are lost and you’ll be back at square one again. While you can unlock the option for these upgrades to appear later in the game, it does suck having to go back to zero no matter what. This is no doubt why the developers added in arcade mode for the PC version, to make things a little easier.
Upgrades are very powerful, yet limited to what you find during a season
Another problem is that the game features a similar setup as Spelunky, with different biomes of environments are used to generate the level design.
Unlike Spelunky, the levels never grow to take on a personality or have special challenges; each mission outside of the story ones plays out the same way, with just a different thing to find or destroy.
The dog-fighting between enemies is the game’s biggest success, but it’s a case where the game doesn’t really do anything to flesh it out into the macro sense of giving more persistence to the proceedings. The Binding of Isaac would be a great counter-example; where every new item, enemy, boss, etc, changes subsequent plays dramatically. I don’t get that same sense of growth with Galak-Z’s progression model.
This is where Galak-Z, quite frankly, fails at its rogue-like design; as each level is just not diverse or interesting enough to make the game feel different, such as in Spelunky or Isaac. And unfortunately, this is what keeps Galak-Z from achieving the same level of greatness as those titles, despite having amazing technical-based gameplay.
Shoot-em-up +:
Galak-Z’s gameplay is amazing and provides a great take on the shump genre that we don’t see often, it’s just missing more elements to the macro side of the game to make it a standout. I would love for the developers to incorporate this kind of gameplay into a game with more rogue-like elements, but for now, Galak-Z is an interesting and stylized marriage between the two.
For more on Galak-Z you can watch my spotlight video.
