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Thursday 7 February, 2008
SUMMARY
Raid'em is a vertical scrolling shmup by David and Peter Wang, released under the free zlib library. The currently available version, 0.3.1, contains three of the four planned levels. Unlike most scrolling shmups, in which a single hit costs the player one of their limited number of lives, Raid'em gives the player 10 hit points and a single life.
GAMEPLAY
From the fact that Raid'em uses enough hit points to give the player 10 effective lives, as compared to the typical 3 lives (or 9 with 3 continues of 3 lives each) one might suppose that Raid'em is easier than a typical entry in the genre. This supposition is very wrong: Raid'em's designers seem to have taken the hit-point system as a cue to fill every stage with a truly staggering number of enemies, nearly all of which take two to three hits to kill. Even the presence of a hit-point power-up (grants 4hp), or the fact that players aren't reset to base weapons whenever they take a hit, doesn't make up for the sheer quantity of enemies and their attacks. As a result, I was unable to make much progress in any of the available levels - even Gradius 3 wasn't so frustrating.
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