RPM - Road Punk Mayhem Reviews

Road Punk Mayhem is a cell shaded shoot em up by Panda Indie Studio! The shmup has 3 pilots to choose from and 5 stages to go through! I’m going to get straight to the point. I’ve played many of this dev’s games such as project star ship x or even z-warp. The game shares similar things from those previous shmups such as being able to teleport to avoid bullets and being encouraged to use your bomb frequently. The things I like about this game is the cell shaded art style and how you can abuse your bomb to kill enemies fairly quickly. I’ve tried all 3 pilots and found the only real difference is the speed of the ship. Of course they have their own different shot types but I couldn’t find a damage difference besides the lady pilot regarding her open shot. There are some personal issues that I have with this game. Now of course, this is just how I feel about the game so others may feel differently. You’ll have to get used to the cooldown period of when you can teleport or bomb. These two things are tied to the same button. When you hit the teleport button you must either reach a threshold which will teleport you to that area or you hit the button again to place you in a specific area. I wasn’t aware of this at first and I’m sure the game told me so I apologize for my blindness. You must actually hold the bomb button to initiate a bomb and this can take around 1? To 2 seconds which again, will take some getting used to as you will need it to kill some enemies quickly. Now that was just my personal gripes with it but as a whole the game does not have difficulty options. The game in the beginning is pretty easy and it drops extends (1UPS) throughout stages quite a bit. It also drops power ups and almost feels like you MUST get all of them in order to defeat the final boss. You’ll eventually realize your bomb actually is powerful and perhaps a bit more useful than your teleport. The reason I say this is because you gain a small amount of I-frames when bombing and can slip through a pattern in many instances. Once you encounter the final boss bombing is essential. During the final boss encounter, you will get the boss to low health and realize your engine is failing. If you fail to bomb the boss early on your engine will explode resulting in an instant game over. Now I don’t have an issue with a game mechanic like that as many shmups have challenged me to death. What I don’t like is the instant change in difficulty only at the end. It would’ve made more sense if when your engine failed, it would explode and delete one or even two of your lives instead. Perhaps this wasn’t the vision of the dev and that's perfectly fine. Either way I still enjoyed my time with this game and it’s fairly cheap. I kinda hate giving it a downvote as I am only really mixed and wouldn't say I don’t recommend it. I still think its a nice shmup to try, it's just not my cup of tea. dont hate me Matt!! :(

I'm having blast with this! P.I.S. really refined their "circle" mechanic over a the years and dropped it into a proper arcade game. I made a YT video of my Switch ver. high score with commentary... not a review per se, but it should give you an idea if this game is for you or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JML0iBgsnrk