Andrew Newton reviews We Are Doomed…
WE ARE DOOMED is a twin-stick shooter where you zap polygon baddies with an absurdly overpowered laserbeam. Dive head-first into the action with reckless ambition, charge the SUPERBEAM, and zap everything out of existence in an instant. Chase high scores or just enjoy the beautiful explosion of geometry, colour and light.
Some of you may know that I am a bit of a retro buff, despite having an X1 I still often like to bring out the Spectrum 128k or Atari 2600 or whatever I feel like at the time. It’s this love of simple games with simple ideas that has brought We Are Doomed by Toronto based developer, Vertex Pop, into my possession. We Are Doomed is a brilliant little game based on the simple idea of moving around the screen, dodging and shooting oncoming objects/creatures/aliens. It’s an idea seen many times before in classic games like Robotron 2084, Asteroids and Smash TV but is still a great little idea that works.
Utilising twin stick control, one for firing and one for movement, We Are Doomed provides us with two modes, Wave and Endless. The former has 30 waves with an ever-increasing quantity and difficulty of creatures to attack and shoot and with only 4 lives this is certainly a challenge. Endless mode is exactly what it says on the box.
Every enemy that you encounter displays very different behaviours. The semi circular green ones will just float around the screen, the light blue arrows will move straight towards you and others will shoot big blasts of fiery death at you. There are other creatures on-screen whose movements need to be taken into account when moving around and figuring out how each one manoeuvres.
Throughout the game there are bluish coloured cubes which, once collected, help power up your Superbeam and this makes you normal laser into a super awesome killer laser for a limited time and can really help change the outcome of a wave. Knowing when to use the superbeam is essential on some waves.
As you would expect of wave 1, there are not many enemies to destroy but some of the later levels have a huge quantity of enemies and this can easily lead to confusion as the scores and explosions distract from the enemies still alive. Despite this, the bright colours, simple shapes and attractive backgrounds make for a wonderfully attractive game.
The sound to the game is slow and relaxing and is brilliantly put together but somehow doesn’t match to the gameplay experience which would seem to demand a quicker paced tune.
Endless mode is pretty much endless. It’s basically a challenge mode to see how high a score you can get and ultimately how long you can survive, which in my case wasn’t more than a few minutes. Expect to see yourself overwhelmed by light blue creatures very quickly.
There’s not a huge amount to We Are Doomed but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth getting. In fact, quite the opposite. The simplicity and attractive artwork of the game is a welcome distraction from the big budget games out today that are set in some war-torn/apocalypse environment and require you to constantly be playing lest you forget missions, processes and controls. It’s a nice addictive little game and if you will excuse me I need to go and try to beat my son’s high-score.
Rating: 8/10
Andrew Newton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pnc360pUDRI&list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
Originally published April 21, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
