Death Ray Manta

Death Ray Manta is a flashy, twin stick shoot em up that plays alot like Robotron meets Waves. Your only controls are Move and shoot, and there is no Options menn or items, so you must play fullscreen (ALT + ENTER may work) and you can't change the volume. There's 32 Levels according to the store page, which often take less than 30 seconds or 90 at most. I found this to be surprisingly fun for it's simplicity, but you may be turned off by the visual noise, disregard for player options, punishing gameplay, or lack of content.

As I work on my backlog, it seems the more of these cheap shmups I play, the simpler they become. Opening DRM (which is a silly acronym) launches a fullscreen game with a brightly colored logo, credits, background and epilepsy warning (which is more than Hyperspace Invaders II can say). Press the Fire/Accept button and you're swifly launched into Level 1 after a short Level intro screen with no plot/story or explaination of controls. It plays like every twin stick shooter though, so move with the left anolog stick and directionally shoot with the right. Suddenly you see a crapton of neon colored enemies, enemy death effects, triangles, level borders, and rainbow bullets from your own "manta". You will probably die pretty quickly with in the first few scenes, which takes you back to the title screen. Press fire and repeat again.

That is all there is too it, but apparently, there are 32 levels. Because the game is so fast paced and visually polluted, I thought these were randomly selected, but it is always the same sequence of levels. Some players will enjoy the "1980s themed" appearance and retrowave/synthwave/darkwave soundtrack - think of games like Hotline Miami and Far Cry: Blood Dragon.

Unlike most shumps, score is counted purely on the amount of levels you complete and the single gem on every screen, which disappears after about five seconds when you start the level - forcing you to make the gem a "risky goal" if you want to increase your score, which will never exceed more than 64. The border of the arena won't kill you, unless you run into the missiles lining it. Turrets on the border can also shoot projectiles that you can destroy easily. Some chasing enemies and in-arena turrets shoot the same kind of projectiles. There are stationary triangles that will kill you upon contact, but are easily destroyed. There are objects that move on a track and can be easily destroyed. Your standard shot has a wide spread and medium range, which kills enemies and destroys objects objects (besides wall turrets and missiles) VERY easily, but one hit and you lose your ENTIRE RUN - I once died on level 30 of 32 because of a simple dodging mistake. This game is both easy and hard and can possibly be finished within anywhere from 15 minutes to 15 hours depending on how many times you fail.

I'm compelled to eventually beat this game due to its short completion time and enjoyably challenge yet kinda fustrating gameplay. If I can complete the game at level 32, then I definitely got my $1 worth. DRMSE is a game I want to recommend to you, but the lack options, frustrating game reset, and color overload will be huge problems for alot of gamers.