Review: PowerUp Forever (XBox Live Arcade)

PowerUp Forever for the XB360 is very very similar to my all-time favorite shooter Battle-Girl by Ultra/United. If you’re, like me, a fan of the old classic, you know that there’s no MacOS X port. I’ve tried to reach Ultra/United many times without luck, and a few years ago their site died, seemingly from the domain expiring. I’d give a lot to be able to play that game again on a modern platform, even if neither graphics nor gameplay was upgraded.

Battle-Girl

The fluid simulation makes it look stunningly beautiful. It’s like you’re in some gigantic creature. After just playing a level or two, I felt that as all levels are open-ended and infinite in size, there’s no element of exploration; that was something I really liked from Battle-Girl. In BG, the first thing you’d do was to explore the level in its entirety to figure out where to hide when something big is incoming, or where Terminus (the end boss) would spawn.

PowerUp Forwever

However, getting into PowerUp, I realized that level design really is present, but in a very different way. It’s like Flow or Spore: you grow for each level, and suddenly those very dangerous enemies are so small and insignificant you just run through them, and the whole level takes on a new scale. There are structures in semi-random patterns, around where your Programmers from BG are; the spawns. Kill enough of them to finish the level. Sometimes the structures are really tight, and with hundreds of enemies all around, you almost panic. Luckilly, there’s the Smart Bomb. I found out the levels aren’t infinite, either; it seems a very fast and annoying enemy starts to spawn the longer from the real level you go, which means that if you wander too far, you will die.

I’ve only played the game for an hour or so, but so far, I thoroughly recommend it. It isn’t BattleGirl, but it’s just as good.