Habroxia

Not enough can be said about all of the great backgrounds found in old school shoot 'em ups. I'm talking about that iconic fire planet in Thunder Force III, the neon-drenched city in Einhander and the fight through the storm clouds in U.N. Squadron. I bring all these up to remind myself what it's like to play in front of a great background, because the new game Habroxia doesn't have any of those. This is a shoot 'em up where every level looks the same and the background is always the empty darkness of space. Boy, what I wouldn't give for a cool fire level right about now.

Habroxia is a shoot 'em up so generic that it doesn't even bother having a story. There's no preamble about aliens threatening Earth, no characters that have to bravely go it alone and not even a name for the experimental ship you're probably flying. It's just a game where you fly from left to right (and occasionally from down to up) in order to shoot down the same three or four bad guys before making way to a boring old boss battle. Do this fifteen times and the so-called "story" mode ends, giving you not even a word of explanation of what just happened.

The most interesting part of the gameplay is that you not only shoot to the right, but you can also kill the bad guys on the floor and ceiling by shooting up and down. Holding both triggers together will combine the two types of fire into a helpful spread shot. You'll want to shoot down enemies and destroy parts of the level to collect credits that can be used to increase the side of that spread, as well as upgrade the power, health, fire rate and more. This is the easiest and fastest way to make your ship unstoppable.

But the truth is, the ship you're flying is pretty much unstoppable even without the upgrades. The first two-thirds of Habroxia is easy to the point of being boring. Even if you somehow can't avoid the slow-moving enemy fire, there's plenty of health pickups floating around. It's not just that I didn't lose a single life in the first ten stages, but also that I wasn't even worried about dying. There's no challenge or tension throughout most of this game. There was never a point where I felt I needed to pay close attention to the bullet patterns or learn a boss's vulnerabilities. The first two-thirds of this game is here to put you to sleep.

The difficulty spikes with the final five stages, which brings me to the game's other big problem -- it's easily exploited. Because so much relies on you upgrading the different parts of the craft, it feels like the game pushes you towards grinding for credits. This comes in the way of replaying stages, but you'll quickly realize that there's a particularly short boss fight that gives you a tidy sum for winning. Best of all, you'll get to the point where you won't even need to move around to defeat the boss. You can just stay in one place, hold the trigger, collect the credits, rinse, repeat. Do that a few times and you'll be ready to take on the slightly more challenging final third.

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The problem with grinding for credits is that you begin to notice how generic everything about this game is. There's nothing interesting about the ship you're flying, the enemies you're killing or the levels you're playing. In fact, I would argue that every stage looks exactly the same. They use the same floors and ceilings, the same space background, the same bad guys, the same obstacles and the same destructible environments. Even the bosses are painfully dull shapes with no personality. I fought against one of them at least a dozen times trying to extract credits, yet I doubt I could tell you what it looked like.

That spells a larger problem for Habroxia. Even though I played through the entire game in a single sitting and saw everything it has to offer, I doubt I'll remember anything about Habroxia a day from now. It's one of the reasons why I felt like I needed to rush out a review, because there's absolutely nothing memorable about this game. Procrastination would only lead me to having to play through the game a second time, and I definitely don't want to do that.

If what you're looking for is the most generic shoot 'em up on the market, then let me introduce you to Habroxia. Anybody looking for an exciting action game with some sort of personality, then look elsewhere. This is a painfully bland slog through fifteen of the dullest levels you'll ever see. It's a paint-by-numbers shooter that wouldn't have cut it in 1989, let alone 2019. Habroxia is the video game equivalent of hitting the snooze button.