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Strike Buster - The Pitfalls of Ambition

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Ambition is the driving force of any project, be it gaming or something else. However Ambition unchecked leads to the pitfalls which many indie devs find themselves in, ultimately resulting in a bad product. Today we take a look at one such case: Strike Buster.

Strike Buster - The Pitfalls of Ambition

Strike Buster is a Horde Defense game which takes place in outer space, in it you're tasked with fighting off against space scorpions. Scorpion infestations really are getting everywhere nowadays, huh? Strike Buster attempts at a novel take on Horde Defense genre by throwing bullet hell mechanics into the mix. However for all the ambitious things it tries doing, it unfortunately fails at making any of it interesting. Now let us go over its shortcomings.

*(Disclaimer: I realise this game is an early demo, as such all my opinions are with that in mind)*

We're in Space?

Let me ask you this: If I were to put you in a room which is painted like space and tell you that you're in space, would you believe me? Of course not! Everything about this room will feel Earth-like, so of course it'd be impossible to look past that. This is how the space in Strike Buster feels like. If you replaced the space background with a floor background, you'll feel absolutely no change whatsoever, that's because the game doesn't try to make you feel like you're in space. You can fly for a long time, yet feel no different then as if you were just walking through an empty desert. The point here is that Strike Buster does a very poor job at making the player feel like they're in space, which is an important aspect of a Space Game.

Space is Flat

What do you imagine when you think of space? A vast expanse of nothingness? A beautiful sea of stars? In the world of 2D space games, there's many different takes on a space background and aesthetics. Even in the 2D medium, it's possible to make Space look beautiful, or perhaps even 3D. While Horde Defense may not be a genre known for beautiful aesthetics, it still remains to be an important part of the genre. From enemies to level designs, these are the things the players stare at, as such making them appealing to look at plays a big factor. However this is another area Strike Buster fails to deliver upon. The background for one is the most flat depiction of Space, you can tell that it's just a static backdrop. The enemies also don't fit the whole space theme, as they're literally just floating scorpions. There's nothing about the game that truly delivers on the space theme.

Wall of Tutorial

There's many popular Walls in video games such as Wall of Flesh, Wall of Ice, Wall of Illusion, but nothing comes close to the ever so feared, Wall of Tutorial Text. Nowadays games have mostly moved away from tutorials of this kind in favour of interactive tutorials, however Strike Buster breaks the mould and brings back the most disliked form of tutorial! Long and boring blocks of text explaining how the game works aren't an enjoyable experience. There's a good reason as to why interactive tutorials are favoured now.

Space has a scorpion problem

Scorpions are surprisingly adaptable beings, to think they would adapt to space like this. It is a strange choice to pick floating scorpions as the main enemies, and even stranger choice to make killing them akin to an old school flash puzzle game. "If the scorpion is red, which weapon would be used to exterminate it?" I wish the answer was any weapon, but no you have to constantly switch between weapons to fulfill the arbitrary condition of needing a matching coloured weapon to kill them. It's not even as if the differently coloured scorpions have different abilities, no they're all the same, just with different colours.

Off-screen Bullet Hell

Normally Bullet Hell games, or even games with Bullet Hell mechanics, make sure that the thing throwing the barrage of projectiles at you is visible on the screen (or easily locatable), since it's quite annoying to have your screen filled with projectiles you need to dodge with no way of resisting. This is another area Strike Buster breaks the mould in, by making Bullet Hell-type enemies spawn far from the player, have infinite reach, and no marker to their location. Meaning you have to find these enemies while your screen is filled with projectiles and you also need to avoid normal scorpions. Fun, no?

Dying has never felt harder

It's not an uncommon thing to feel invincible by the end of any game (especially JRPGs), trust me I speak from experience as an avid D&D 5e enjoyer. Though in Strike Buster that's the case from the very beginning. To explain in detail: In Strike Buster you have an health bar which is creatively named "energy bar". Getting hit obviously makes your energy deplete, however killing space scorpions replenishes a little bit of your energy. That in itself doesn't sound bad till you consider the abundance of the scorpions, and the fact they're easy to exterminate due to a lack of scaling. This makes the concept of "death" an incredibly hard to achieve thing. It is very evident that this game demo went through no play testing prior to release, which is an unfortunate thing as that makes the chances of it winning anything abysmal.

Closing remarks

Strike Busters is an example of the pitfalls that unchecked Ambition leads to. As I said in the beginning, Ambition unchecked only leads down one path, the path to a bad product. That is why keeping the scope of the game focused and smaller in scale in the beginning is very important, and I don't mean that just for gaming either, it is always important to have smaller yet achievable goals when going head first into an Ambitious project. Another way you could look at is "Quality over Quantity", having many different mechanics may seem appealing, but if those mechanics don't do much of anything then they're just useless fluff. This demo of Strike Buster is a case study of "Quantity over Quality". There's many different ambitious features in the game, however none of them are fleshed out or serve any real purpose, making them be useless additions and overall a bad product.

I don't mean to say that it can't improve, it's only the first demo after all. But to see such a bad iteration of it be the one used for a massive tournament event, is ittedly a disappointing sight. To me that is a sign of a lack of care and quality control amongst the dev team. As such, this isn't a game I see hitting big. It misses the heart of an indie game and the love of its indie devs. It is simply another game that finds itself down the pitfall of Ambition.

Posted on 06/18/202313K Views