From here to infinity.
Warning Forever, to put it simply, is indie at its finest.
Synopsis:
Developed single-handedly by Hikoza Ohkubo, this is an amazing game that relies on a score-based incentive with a "one more" addictiveness.
Essentially, the game is comprised of fighting an infinite stream of the same boss. However, the boss evolves, grows, and adapts to your strategies with each reincarnation. The boss starts out in its neutral state called the "Pure Heart". And based on how you attack, it learns in several ways:
- If you attack from the same side everytime, the boss will grow more and more defenses, and eventually shields, in that section.
- If you prefer to attack from all sides, the boss will grow appendages with weapons at the end in order to sweep-fire you off.
- If the boss successfully finds an effective weapon against you, it will have more of that in the next reincarnation.
- If you like to stay close to the boss, the boss will start to turn and use ramming maneuvers.
...among more tricks that it will learn.
Your ship, on the other hand, remains the same. So in order to keep up with a constantly evolving and constantly learning enemy, you must out think and out maneuver your evolving boss.
Gameplay:
Your ship works in a standard shmup fashion. It runs on a one-hit kill policy. In order to effectively fight an evolving boss, you're equipped with two firing modes: standard straight scatter and a multi-directional cone. The directional cone is always the flexible and sensible firing choice. It doesn't work like a twin-stick shooter ala Robotron or Geometry Wars. The direction and size of the cone is dictated by your ship trajectory, and firing locks the cone in direction and size.
All of this creates a very addictive gameplay formula. Whether you are driven by score or driven to see which evolution you can shape the boss to change, it will keep you coming back. Stages typically last under one minute, which makes battles short, sweet, frenetic, and epic. It does take a while to build up while waiting for the boss to grow. The boss gets challengingly big at around Stage 10. And grotesque, it can certainly be.
The game keeps scoreboards for every game mode that you set. However, in order to see your high scores on another game mode, you have to set the whole game back into that mode. There is also no aggregated scoreboard. It's an unnecessary hassle as seeing how modern scoreboards feature flip functionality, which let you thumb through pages of scoreboards.
Replays are also automatically saved for you. There is a high score replay for every stage that you've reached, and also a last recording. Sometimes, I wish there was a manual way to save and sort your replays.
Graphics:
This game sports a very clean, simple, efficient vector line sprites. It's interesting to see how the same essential boss parts are arranged to build bigger evolutions of bosses, just like Legos. The interface is clean and minimalistic. It definitely adds to its presentation flavor.
The different kinds of bullets the boss shoots at you are clearly defined, so that you know exactly what's coming to you. Although, it is easy to lose track of other shots when they go through a cloud of other shots. When there's so much going on in the screen at later levels, being able to tell the difference between a needle spread, a cannon shot, and a smash shot helps assess their trajectories, threat, and dodge priority.
The bosses blow up nicely too, in a 2D sprite explosion sort of way.
Sound:
The biggest audio fault of Warning Forever is also its biggest complement. There is no BGM. But, the game gives you the ability to customize your own soundtrack if you know how to encode your music to ogg vorbis (.ogg).
The sound effects are crisp, and the explosions sound nice and functional.
Conclusion:
Warning Forever is an excellent indie game. It blends the strategic with the frenetic; a thinking man's shmup. It has the addictiveness of branching paths, score-driven play, and honing of skill. What it lacks in length, it surprises with depth. This game also boasts the most value for a game that I heartfeltly enjoy. Why?
It's also free.
http://www18.big.or.jp/~hikoza/