Galaxy Warfighter

From sloppy writing to cheap bosses to the occasional slowdown, there are a lot of things I'll put up with when it comes to enjoying a shoot 'em up. The one thing I won't put up with? Boredom. Which brings me to today's review, a new side-scrolling shooter that is a lot more interested in coin collecting than blowing up alien spaceships. I'm talking about Galaxy Warfighter from Qplaze, a long-time mobile game developer who is just now making their console debut. And while that may be an exciting milestone, I guarantee that it's the only thing exciting about this side-scrolling snoozefest.

Don't go into Galaxy Warfighter looking for a deep story, because there isn't one. With no setup or characters, we're forced to assume that alien invaders are threatening Earth and there's only one person who can stop them with some sort of experimental space craft. The goal is to fly through one-hundred increasingly challenging stages in hopes of collecting coins and upgrading your ship.

When I say levels, what I really mean are waves. You fight waves of bad guys in front of random backgrounds. That's it. Every level plays out exactly the same way -- you shoot down a set amount of bad guys and then take on one of four bosses. Once you've done that, it's back to the upgrade shop to buy more drones, heavier firepower and special abilities that will stop time and shoot out a powerful shockwave.

Even though this is a console game, the emphasis on coins and upgrades makes it feel like it came from the mobile world. You also see that in the gameplay, which is so simple that it doesn't even make you push a button to shoot. It's also slow and forgiving in a way that most console shooters aren't, almost as if it was made for a touchscreen or some other less-than-ideal controller.

All that is curious, but the real problem is the repetition. Nowhere is this more obvious than the boss battles. I want to reiterate that there are only four different bosses for a game with one-hundred stages. And it's not like you only see one of these bosses every five or ten levels, because there's a big battle at the end of literally every stage. Sometimes you'll run into the same boss two or three times in a row. And while they do get gradually tougher as the levels stack up, you fight them the same way every single time. The monotony is a real problem here.

Click For the Full Picture Archive

It doesn't help that Galaxy Warfighter is one of the easiest shoot 'em ups to come out in a long while. I found that I didn't need to upgrade my ship at all until about a quarter of the way through, and even then, both the enemies and bosses were incredibly easy to gun down. The difficulty doesn't really ramp up until the back half of the game, but by that point you'll have more than enough health, drones, shields and firepower to survive anything. The challenge doesn't come in the waves of bad guys, but rather you staying interested long enough to see the ending.

On the bright side, I do like the look of the game. Galaxy Warfighter has a number of gorgeous backgrounds, including a few with beautiful shots of pixelated planets. I also really like the little touches that go along with stopping time and using your shockwave attack. And I suppose it's worth mentioning that I didn't run into any sloppy writing, cheap bosses or slowdowns, so at least it has that going for it. Unfortunately, even with we count those as positives, we're still left with a long, monotonous and ultimately pointless exercise in repetition that never quite figures out what makes this genre so much fun.