Razor2: Hidden Skies Reviews

Ehh... I got this in a bundle I think. So I paid almost nothing for it. So for that price it was... palatable, if a little bland and unpolished. But for the full asking price of €9.99? Nope. Not a chance. For €0.99 it might be worth considering.

This game looked cool for 2.50, but i feel like i wasted my money. No tutorial, No explanation of what upgrades do, or what in-game items are for; yes after a couple of minutes of game play you figure it out but im sure this has turn other players away. wish i could get my money back.

This game could have been a lot better, but it isn't. The ship upgrading part of the game is pretty cool and that had me excited. Unfortunately, that was all. It would be nice if you received more money to better experience what all the upgrades have to offer. The collision/hit boxes are terrible, primarily on your own ship. You try and go around a stationary enemy and you end up with a collision even though there was plenty of space between. The camera isn't entirely top-down like most shoot-em-ups, but that's not necessarily a good thing, especially not with this game. Sometimes it's almost impossible to tell if any bullets are going to hit you or if you're able to dodge them. Chances are, you're going to get hit. There's a game called AirStrike. That one's much better. At first I thought this game was designed to be tough, but later on I just wasn't so sure. I enjoyed Raptor, Tyrian, and Do-Don-Pachi. This game felt like it was challenging only due to design flaws.

Razor 2: Hidden Skies tries gallantly to emulate the shmups of yore, but falls flat not for want of creativity (though it could certainly use a bit more), but inexcusable cock-ups on the game mechanics themselves. The game attempts, in some places, to be a bullet hell game but the hitbox of your ship is extremely large and does not even match the graphic - it awkwardly extends out an uncertain distance to both sides, but does not seem to include the nose of the fighter. Furthermore, the areas extend visually farther than your actual range of motion, but this is impossible to tell without running right into an invisible wall. In several areas, enemies park right on this wall, giving the illusion that you can zip around them to avoid fire and take them out, right up until you crash into them headlong making the attempt. This is made even more unweildly by the boss fights that zoom the camera out, supposedly to impress you with how big the boss is. Sadly the net result is that now you can see even more but have the same narrow movement lane, exacerbating the problem even more. Two subweapons are heat-seeking with auto targetting, but there is no mechanic to choose what you'd like to target - the game seems to completely arbitrarily choose for you, and even if the lock-on happens to be a priority target, anything flying in the path of your slow-traveling relativistic missiles will intercept them and explode instead. (Which prompts the question of how does a missile travelling at relativistic speeds even work, and if it does why are they so bloody slow?) The bosses are all recycled variants of each other - fight three tanks, then fight three spinning satellite things, then... etc. Unfortunately the problems do not stop there. Movement is imprecise and jerky. Combine this with the awkard hitboxes and you've committed a cardinal sin in the shmup genre - dodging is effectively impossible in places, though this doesn't matter a terrible lot since to cover for this the game slathers you in multiple shields which partially refresh upon each pick-up. Despite that fact, you still take a lot of hits simply because your hitbox isn't where you think it is, and it's nigh impossible to guage where its limits are precisely, since it extends well beyond the ship graphic. Unfortunately, the pickups themselves don't make a terrible lot of sense. One of the most common is Energy, which restores a pip on your Energy meter. Which is grand, only the game never quite explains what Energy is for or why you want it, despite being able to upgrade your ship batteries to have more of it. Oh well, free shields I guess! In general the game is horridly unpolished. The translation is riddled with grammatical errors, word misuse, and typos (I'm not sure what a Gravity Riffle is). Each mission has a cheesy low-quality text-to-speech mission introduction voiceover, only it gets a few words into it before the explosions start and the rest is completely drowned out. Oops. Hope it wasn't important. Soon after starting the second mission, the primary fire input became stuck and I was essentially on autofire for the rest of the game. Which isn't all bad I suppose, except with the input stuck, I became unable to read mission briefings (not a tremendous loss since they're an exercise in bad English and misspelled words) and upon finishing and going to the main menu it would spam me right into a new game on Easy Mode, not allowing me to change settings or even exit the game. I had to alt-tab and manually kill it. In short, I can't recommend this game at all, even to die-hard shmup fans, unless you seriously need a fix and simply cannot find something else to scratch the itch.

Very enjoyable shoot'em'up with nice graphics, sounds and presentation. I wish there was an option to control the ship with the mouse, though.

[b]Made by the developers of Bad Rats, need I say more?[/b] This game is bad. Really bad. The gameplay is repetitive and boring, even before the end of the first level I wanted to stop playing. The voice acting is the worst I've heard, the music is a short 30 second loop, the fire sound is awful and since this is a space shooter you'll hear it A LOT. Visually the foreground and background objects feel like they are drawn for two entirely different games (they don't mesh well) and are hard to look at. I'm sad that I even installed this game, in the end I found no enjoyment. If this review saves you from experiencing this terrible title then I have succeeded.

This game had a few issues; The collision with other enemies is atrocious. You'll often take damage without even touching the incoming ship. The bullets are ok though; This collision issue gets worse when you notice the area you can move in around is much smaller than it looks; It crashed a few times which is really annoying; Not all menus can be controlled by keyboard, for example I couldn't close the medal earned windows, it's rather annoying to have to click it with the mouse when I'm mostly playing this with the keyboard; Speaking of the menus, their click area also seems to be a bit off. Sometimes the option doesn't get lit up even though the mouse is hovering over it. Should respond to a rectange that expands well beyond the text to avoid such annoyance; Some weapons seemed clearly more powerful and useful than the others, so that got me into not even bothering with the other ones; The default options have to be changed. I only noticed there was a woman talking on the second time I played the game - the default Music Volume value severely overpowers both the voice (which is quite useful) and the game sounds; There is a large number of resolutions available... but not mine? (1600x900) Really? C'mon... Also, the W resolutions (which I suppose stands for Widescreen) for some reason make the game display wrong. It'll not show up fully to the top, so you'll not see most enemies that appear near the top. I don't know if I crapped the configs up to get that effect or what, but it happened, so I switched to windowed mode at 1024x768 I settled with that; The time limit for the bosses is annoying. I killed a boss at the last few seconds of the time limit, and it ran out and killed me while the boss was exploding. It offered me to continue, which I accepted, it completed the mission and for some reason the next one no enemies could shoot and they would die a few instants after entering the screen. Not sure if related, but, that's a glitch right there.... That aside, it was pretty fun, though nothing memorable. I personally found the soundtrack a bit weird, I felt like I was playing God of War or some shit lol

Just in case, if that red labelled negative review might not pull newbies to try this seemingly retrograde appearing game, It isn't that bad actually. A top-down spaceship shooter might seem too niche to get a hold of , and yes, the concept certainly lacks originality. Of course, anyone familiar would have tried such thing once in their time, here or there. Still, I would say its a laudable try by developers to put it in one piece. The game play is surely satisfying and fun. The dodgy movements to tackle bullets might be not so simple to achieve, but you'll get it eventually. The ship comes equipped with 4 types of guns:- Missiles, Shooters & Sprayers type, Laser to clear your way off the enemies as the screen moves ahead towards the penultimate gigantic boss ship. If you just like bursting the enemies into bits and pieces and are fanatic when it comes to spraying bullets, expect to have your quenchable appetite. One thing that still quite not fit in is the replayability feature. You're just given two turns in the entire game, having 5 chances each. Easy does it sound, but don't get fooled , ITS FREAKIN HARD. And yeah, you gotta have to start over from mission 1 , Introduction once you are exhausted of both the turns. That is disgustingly frustrating forcing me to give 5/10. A thin border line between recommended and not-recommended. Rest, choice is yours.

Quick review coming from a shmup lover. The Good : - the game does't look too bad. By today's standards, it doesn't look too good either, but I wouldn't mind if it played ok. - Music sounds good, but... The Bad : - Controls are rigid. Don't even try to play with an XBOX360 controller... - Patterns are repetitive. - I have a big feeling problem with this game. Can't feel the power of the weapons. Can't feel when I'm hit. This is probably because the sound in the game is not very well balanced. - ... the sounds FX are weak. Can't hear any explosion. Shot sounds are flat and weak. - Music sounds totally inappropriate. It's good, but it feels like it's the music from another game... Definitely not worse the full price.

As there is nowadays a big influx of shooters games on steam there is starting to be somewhat of a crowd at the bottom of the pile. This game is down there in the pile. It may perhaps be more on top of that pile as there are worse shooters but that doesnt help much. Why so? As other reviews have accurately described this game suffers from hard to tell hit collision as enemies alter altitude and often approach you from behind. I'd also add that pacing is a problem. Evidence? Find a Let's play video about the first level -> notice the attack patterns and hit boxes? Long long chains of repeating patterns come at you. And then without much ado the boss crawls forth to battle you. I must also point out it's by far biggest sin: Pricing. there are other shooter games that i won't be naming that score points as they are simply so incredibly cheap you can get them for some coins and they give you that 30-60min of mediocre fun. This one is overpriced and gets annoying quickly and thus it's price/quality is bonkers. I like to see past problems of games and find redeeming qualities in them that would make them different and perhaps place them in a niche. Alas i can't find any redeeming qualities in this game considering the competition on steam AND pricing.