Novastrike - PlayStation 3 Game Review

The basic plot of this game borrows pretty heavily from Stargate in that some aliens use portals to enter our world and take things over. You play the pilot of a ship called the Scythe, and it has the ability to adapt itself to use enemy weapons that you pick up from the debris of their damaged ships. In other words, you can get power-ups in the game, just like in pretty much every other top-down shooter I’ve ever played. The game features seven stages that get progressively more difficult as you move along.

The game is presented using an overhead view and you can’t move the camera angle at all. You control your ship sort of the same way as the classic Atari game Asteroids, but you have a slight turning radius that makes the game a little more difficult. The controls do work pretty well as far as responsiveness, but it is hard to stay locked on a target when the enemy ships literally fly circles around you.

Your objectives in each stage usually involve destroying something or protecting something else. You will face countless aerial targets, of which most are peons type fighters with a few tougher ones in between. There are also plenty of ground targets that tend to do more damage with their weapons and take longer to destroy. A pretty wide variety of special guns and bombs will come available as you play through the stages, and these will help make combat a lot easier. At the end of each stage, there is a boss you must face.

I thought the graphics looked pretty good in Novastrike, at least as far as they compare to the other PS3 downloadable games I’ve bought from the Playstation Store. Each stage takes place in a different environment, so you’ll go through a variety of colors and landscapes as you play. This game is played in HD format and all the animations are very fluid. It’s such a busy game that the constant explosions and bursts of color are visually appealing. The sound is pretty decent as far as an action shooting games go, but it all gets to be repetitive and chaotic very quickly. In short, this game is fast and loud.

Because you can’t save the game until the stage is complete, Novastrike can be pretty challenging. There were several times where I had almost completed the stage when something happened and I lost my last ship, meaning I had to play the whole stage over again. That sort of thing is par for the course with these type shooting games, as the levels were really meant to be played over and again.

In the end, I got plenty of enjoyment out of Novastrike. It’s basically just another top-down shooter with a few extra bells and whistles to help it stand out. If you like that sort of game, then you’ll probably find something to like about this one.

Official website: http://www.tikigames.net/novastrike