Shwip Reviews

TL;DR: Yeah, I like this! It's a skillbased shmup with a shwip and very colorful visuals. Try it out for a couple bucks! ----- I've never really played a lot of twin stick games, and I found this game searching for alternatives to Geometry Arena and Nova Drift. Notably, this game has no meta-progression or roguelike elements like those games, it's purely arcade-style fun (with some other modes as well). There are no random pickups, there is no changing out weapons, you have everything you may need from the start. It's therefore 100% skill based, which could be interesting for some people. From the perspective of someone who enjoys roguelites, it's lacking in replayability a bit though. Still, for the price it's perfectly acceptable if you're done in just a few games. The short 3 minute arcade format fits well and quick restart allows you to quickly get a couple games in and it hooks okay. I haven't tried the mine dodging mode. The Style mode is fun as well, with a longer playtime. You're required to complete quests with certain weapon combinations, which unlocks a difficult 'boss wave' you have to complete in order to progress. However, you only get 1 life, so it's much more difficult than arcade where you only lose a bit of combo meter if you die. The weapons are mostly fun to use, I like the addition of a magnet and a push in order to have a little more control over enemy positions, and it feels great blasting enemies caught in a magnet with a mine or missile, or simply pushing their disabled bodes into the arena wall. A few weapons are hard to make use of. Cannon, Missile and Whip have a 'normal' and a 'special', though I feel there's often just one way you want to use the weapon. The missiles for example, are normally slow and dumbfire, which is barely okay if you have a magnet but kinda useless otherwise. The 'special' launches a salvo of homing missiles, and feels far more useful. For the default cannon, it feels the other way around. The normal cannon is perfectly decent at what it does, but the 'special' is just firing in the direction of your ship, so you're suddenly using left stick to aim with a narrower hitbox while flying at the target you're trying to kill. I'd probably use it more if it was like a big 'flak' to clear the enemies in front of you. The titular whip is sadly the weapon I enjoy the least. It's necessary to use because killing enemies with it regains health, which is a great risk/reward mechanic. You can also theoretically use it to shield yourself from bullets and swat objects around, but that's in a real game really hard to do. It feels more like a weak lightsaber, and there's very little 'whip' like about it. The range is very low, unless you swivel your right stick around very fast. You can launch it away with the special to use it ranged, but it's slow and difficult to aim before it shrinks in size again, so it'll always be a bit of a sad, small whip. In general, it just doesn't feel all that great to use. I'd like if this gets a bit of an overhaul where it's longer and/or has more momentum/length/elasticity, so you can maybe topple your right stick over the middle and really get that snappy whip feel. It may also be interesting if the whip is passively moving with your ship and reacts to its movement (which is what I thought it'd be when I bought the game) so it's more prominently present in a game called Shwip. A few improvements that could be made as well is just a few more indications of when a certain skill is ready. Like a little menu on the side that shows your different weapons, which one you're currently using, and cooldowns. I would probably mostly look at the screen, but having a bit more visual feedback in the UI would help so I don't accidentally switch to use my missile special while it's still on cooldown, and then be stuck with slowly firing dumb missiles. I have played like 5 games, but did get scores into the top 10 in Arcade and Style mode. Therefore, there are clearly not enough people playing this game or investing a lot of time yet. The steam achievements will also take a long time to complete, so I think most people won't bother going for them (hence the low completion rates). I think that's a shame, because gameplay and visual-wise I've really enjoyed it so far. The shared/split coop part is something I still want to try out as well, I'm happy it's there. Overall: I think I'll play this a few more times, and then I'm done.

The game is good, tho very experimental A lot of things don't really feel right and the game feels very empty, I think my major complaint has to be with the weapons and the maneuvering of the ship The game doesn't have the possibility to go slower than max speed, if you move, you go at full speed and that can be a pain in minefield mode as doing small movements is impossible There is no way to deal with very large ammounts of enemies, as soon as they start piling up you're eventually screwed as your main weapon, the cannon, isn't designed for that and the missiles aren't really all that usefull But the biggest problem I have with wepons, is the whip The whip, like the game, was shown has a very smooth weapon, usefull in a ton of situations, and is I belive the main selling point to me, it's rather unique Well, as of right now, this whip is clunky, often doesn't even damage enemies, puts you into extreme danger, and sometimes just appear to just stop working completely Idk if it is due to the engine change, but the whole game is way more clunky than shown in the trailers, which kinda ruins it for me Still, a good game