Incandescent Reviews

I am playing shoot 'em ups for 30 years now and I have seen and played a lot of them. This might be a game by a hobbyist, who just did it for fun. In that case my appologies for the following, but to me this game was not worth the (little) money I paid. Unfortunatley, Incandescent is an uninspired shoot 'em up. The graphics are simple copies of other "neon style" shooters. The enemies are repetitive and just disturbing, but not challenging. In several situations there is no visual/ acustic feedback, including when dying or when hitting bosses. It is not really difficult, I had a hard time when getting bored after a few minutes (100000 score) to finally loose all ships, while still doing a bit of resistance, until I gave up at 200000 score. Afterwards I was hard thinking about anything new, special, well implemented, fun of this shooter, but I was not able to find anything. Not recommendable. There are others worth the money and fun.

50 levels, approx play time 1 hour or less? cloud save (although there's no save state since it's rather arcade?) trading cards and I guess I got it for less than 2€ when it was on sale neon looks a quick session and you "played one more game" no actual reasons to say don't buy it, for 2€ it might almost be expensive (comparing to F²Ps especially) but I bet I got it on sale, so: I -would- recommend it in that case...

If I were to describe this game in simple terms, I'd say that this room captures everything great about the classic arcade shooters like Galaga and Asteriods and puts in a sleek modern package while retaining the aesthetics of the time with interesting wave-mode gameplay that plays much like a 2D arena shooter, emphasizing constant movement and precise aiming to make the absolute best of your offense. They also utilize a very simple to grasp controls (you use WASD to move and the right mouse to fire your main gun and your left mouse to fire off your clusterbomb which does a circlular damage spread), the game is easy for those accustomed to PC controls to pick up and with the leaderboard system to fuel you forward, it's a thrill to spend a couple of minutes here and there blasting away through waves of enemies. Speaking of which, many of the enemies in the game are rather easy to dispatch, but the sheer number of them rapidly grows over the rounds and if you're not careful and swift with your movement, you'll find yourself down on lives and clusterbombs trying to dispatch them all. Some follow you closely by, trying to make you take direct damage, while others will pepper you from a distance but none will take more than a few well placed shots to rid off, excluding bosses of course. With many powerups scattered throughout the level to boost your damage output, such as homing and tri-shot bullets for your primary fire, you'll never be able to take on a fight. Speaking of bosses, many of the bosses in this game are really just bullet sponges and not really good at that. Their health pools are massive and their attacks are potent, but really, I found that flying in circles and spamming into their large hitbox was rather easy and just whittling away at their health was more time-consuming than challenging when facing off against them alone. All in all, I'd give Incandescent a 8.5 out of 10 for being a ton of fun in a retro-style space shooter, but beyond arcade value, it lacks in content and challenge.

graphics are cool, but the game and sound track are pretty bland

Buggy abandoned game. Achievements don't work either, that is why seemly simple achieves have a low completion rate on steam stats.

[B]If I hear the same 7.4 seconds of looping music one more time I might straight up kill a dude[/b]

I had great fun with this game, it's sorta like playing those old asteroids style games with a few small twists. Bosses and different power-ups. Definitely worth the small investment to get it.

Incandescent is a twin stick shoot-em-up game which is very reminiscent of something like Geometry Wars 3D: Evolved. Although the game is very cheap it's also not very good with many issues such as: -Enemies spawning in without any indication. Most enemies spawn only at the edges so that's fine but there is one enemy type, the red turrets, which can spawn anywhere on the map making the incredibly frustrating. -Enemy bullets being nearly indistinguishable from all the particles that fly from defeated enemies. -A very simple music loop which gets boring and repetitive quick. -The gameplay doesn't evolve and none of the enemies or bosses really require any special thought to defeat. Overall I would not play this game and would rather buy Geometry Ward 3D: Evolved instead as it has the exact same gameplay and aesthetics except miles better.

I would like to talk directly about the shortcomings of the game. First of all, listening to the same music over and over again is really annoying. Although it seems like a small detail to put an extra soundtrack, it seriously changes the game experience. The second negative thing is the camera angle. So it doesn't seem to have a style that you are very comfortable with. However, the colorful level designs and variety of weapons, health, and other features that can be improved make the game playable. I can say that it is a fun game that definitely deserves its price.

This is a very simple twin stick shooter. It does not have a lot of depth, but what it does it does alright. Pros: - Good music - Starts out very easy. This is important because you are not automatically dead while you work out how to play. I am terrible at this game, and yet the easy early waves still had me progressing farther than I had any right to. - various weapon powerups are fun - Has a reasonable level of polish - Overall I liked the sound effects, with the exception of the constant sound of the gun firing. Cons: - The biggest issue for me was too many colors that were used multiple times making it hard for threats to stand out. Every enemy I destroyed turned into lots of colored sparks. Colored sparks that blended right in with the loads of enemy shot sparks and my own bullet sparks. In the end half the time progressing seemed to be just a matter of always moving and pure luck. - I played on a mouse and keyboard setup, and the controls were serviceable but not great. I suspect this game needs a controller to be the most fun. - Seemed to be little to no reason not to constantly fire. Should have had an auto-fire toggle somewhere. - Beating bosses didn't get you any special reward. I felt like killing the bosses should have gotten you a powerup or extra life or something. As it was they were just a slightly larger enemy with a lot of life. - The scrolling does not work in the player's favor. The whole game is just played in a box. But the box doesn't fill the screen. You need to get pretty close to the edge of the screen before the view scrolls in that direction, giving you a small field of view as you move forward and leading to cheap deaths. I debated on this one, but in the end for me despite all of the cons I enjoyed the game (probably because it starts out so easy). A decent, cheap casual twin stick shooter. 6/10