Strategize and harvest planets between intense waves of enemies | Open Beta Review - Arcadium
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✨Overview
Arcadium - Space Odyssey is a survival roguelite shooter set in a procedurally generated universe, featuring pixel art retro visuals and space/planet exploration elements. It is set to release on Android, iOS, and coming soon on Steam, with an Open Beta currently available on Android with full features, and a demo version available on Steam.
📖Story and Premise
The game lacks a detailed story, and focuses more on gameplay than an intricate narrative, its premise revolves around survival in a procedurally generated universe. Players battle relentless alien hordes, strategically enhance their builds, and explore space to harvest planetary resources.
🎨Visuals and Art
Arcadium adopts a pixel art retro visual style, with space-themed environments, colorful alien designs, and cool visual effects. The pixel art graphics create a charming and cohesive aesthetic that complements the overall theme. The low-fi retro-like soundtrack complements the outer space theme too while capturing the energetic spirit of space shooters during combat. The sound effects have a rhythmic beat, like a rhythm-based game.
🎮Gameplay
The game is essentially a single-stick shooter; you steer the direction of the spaceship, and it will automatically fire its weapons. There is supposed to be a twin-stick shooter option for manual aiming, but it is currently locked in the version that I played. There are up to four abilities to activate, two starting, and then up to two more via upgrades during runs. It’s entirely playable with one hand, although with how the ability buttons are placed, you might want to play it with two to ensure you can effectively activate your abilities while moving.
🕹Rogue-lite
There are six levels, and except for the last “Endless” map, all require that you survive at least 15 minutes to clear them. There are no other objectives but to survive. As a rogue-lite, when you die, you need to restart the whole 15-minute run. Rogue-lite elements come from a randomized choice of three upgrades whenever you level up during runs, ranging from additional projectiles to defense mechanisms to entirely new activated abilities. There are also random shops and interactibles scattered across the procedurally generated maps for a chance to gain more rewards aside from the usual level-up.
🌍Planetary Exploration
Arcadium adds its twist to the space rogue-lite shooter by incorporating planetary exploration elements; that is, you can land on planets and extract their resources, leading to more gold and EXP. The actual mechanism is rather simple; you just need to get close to the land and let its gravity “land” your ship to it, and after a certain amount of uninterrupted time, you start the extraction. It’s not very deep, but it’s a nice added gameplay layer that is slightly removed from the twitchy bullet-hell nature of rogue-lite shooters.
⏫Progression
Persistent progress comes in the form of unlocking new ships and expanding your roster of starting upgrades, all unlocked by completing challenges and milestones like destroying 1000 ships or extracting 50 planets. The roster of 10 ships themselves come with different starting abilities, with my personal favorite being the Minerva with its Pocket Black Hole ability, featuring jaw-dropping distorted Black Hole visual effects.
All in all, I found the game pretty easy, as I was mostly able to complete the levels in one or few tries, and there isn’t really much variety in the builds you can make. I almost always see the same upgrades over and over during the course of my playthrough, and I was basically bulldozing through the hordes of enemies even without really paying attention to both my build and my actual movement.
📊Technical Performance
The game ran smoothly, at a perfect 60fps, which is not surprising for a pixel art game, although I did encounter one game-breaking bug that locked the virtual joystick to one side. Easily fixable though by just minimizing the game and restoring it again.
💵Monetization
The game is free-to-play but with occasional unobtrusive ads that appear very rarely. There is a cheap one-time fee to fully remove the ads, although with how rarely it appears, I don’t really see much reason to, except for supporting the developers. Please do note that the game is still in Open Beta and it’s probably not finalized.
⚖️Conclusion
The addition of planetary exploration/harvesting sets Arcadium - Space Odyssey apart from traditional rogue-lite space shooters, offering players a chance to strategize and gain resources between intense waves of enemies; however, it falls short in delivering a truly challenging and varied rogue-lite experience, at least in this current Open Beta version. I do believe it’s still worth a try though.
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