Vheitross
Now that I have a full-time job again it’s hard to find the time to play games, between arriving home after an exhausting day sitting really hard in front of a computer and crashing gratefully into bed at too late an hour after tossing away my evening on IM. But tonight I stumbled upon a game that captivated me from the moment its title flickered onto screen. An hour later, I rejoined the real world with an aching left arm and a pre-rolled in my lap that had dislodged itself from my gaping maw, with just one gripping thought: ‘Beeping chat windows be damned! The world must know of Vheitross!’
As in Geometry Wars, you control a little spaceship that flies around and shoots other, often bigger spaceships. As in Geometry Wars, there are no pickups and no half-baked special events. Purity is the draw here. Its mechanism, however, is derived from rather different games. It takes equally from vertical shmups and from Asteroids to create something of a genius mindfuck that explains itself through play much better than I can on paper.
On top of this genre mash, Vheitross offers remarkable strategic depth by dualizing your essential functions. With two modes of movement – strafing/rotating – and two types of bullets – each with two firing patterns – you can contort your ship through any angle into and back out of dangerous situations with ease… once the contortions demanded of your left hand map themselves into muscle memory, anyway. You can also boost directionally and fire off two sweet mega weapons – respectively, an explosion of missiles and a final-level-in-Sonic-style laser beam.
Yes!
Vheitross appears to be ‘merely’ a proof of concept, if a well formed one, as it has only one play mode and only two objectives. Get points! Don’t die! But then, what a play mode. The action starts off slow each time you start, but the map quickly fills with enemy ships of different varieties, and before you know it the difficulty’s ramped up to what I would describe as ‘stressful’. The enemies come in different flavours, and they all have bullets. Your initial resistance is a smattering of morons drifting aimlessly about the place apparently shooting from the hip, but at regular intervals a new enemy type is introduced that does actually pose a threat. These are intermittently backed up by boss ships that suck up hell of bullets, well outstaying their welcomes.
And then at some point your concentration wavers and you’ve exploded and want to cry. And then you knock in your initials for the high score table. And then the title flickers on again with retro pull set to max, and you must have another go at this modern classic.
Download Vheitross and then tell its developer how fierce it is
