This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Whoa there! Two reviews in a single day! We are here to talk about a little arcade shooter called GearShifters. I bought this game on a hunch a long time ago, and once I started it I was instantly hooked until the end. My final playtime was a short 7 hours, but I can tell you that I didn’t load up a single other video game during that time. It occupied my time long few have, so let’s break it down.

GearShifters is a side scrolling vehicle combat game like a mix of Ikaruga and Spy Hunter, except you know… horizontal. You play as a delivery driver in a world were everything has gone wrong. There are multiple factions that control the wasteland and the mysterious Citadel which, lets say house civilization. You and your very small group of rag tag partners are looking to just survive running dangerous delivery missions out in the faction controlled wasteland.

You are the driver, and since going into faction areas without a weapon would be suicide your crew has outfitted your car to be able to fire back. When the game starts off, you only having a machine gun on the top of your car and that is about it. As you progress through the game and pickup schematics that randomly drop out of your enemies, you can upgrade your car to have different types of primary guns, install secondary guns, make modifications regarding tires, armor, and horsepower, or even give yourself a nifty paintjob or mechanical ability. How you upgrade your car is somewhat up to your personal taste, but there are some weapons and modifications that make boss fights or areas easier for you and are highly recommended. For instance one faction is essentially the winter faction, and while its not required, it will serve you better to equip tires that give you better handling while driving through that area.

All the equipment that you purchase can be swapped in and out when at your shop without having to re-purchase anything, and you will want to experiment with different setups in order to see what gives you the best feel.

As you progress through the game you will also learn different driving moves that allow you to power slide, spin to avoid lockons, and other stuff. These driving moves are progress gated, and if you learn something new, chances are you will need to know it for whatever upcoming boss you have to tackle.

On to the actual missions. In any of the levels that are not boss battles, you will be driving down a road and enemies will show up from time to time that you have to either deal with or ignore. I should stress now that this game is very much pattern recognition. While there are certain “types” of enemies you will face, each faction has it’s own grunts that do unique attacks. Some enemies simply try to ram you causing massive damage if they hit you, some enemies will want to keep you in front of them so they can use their own mounted machine guns, and other enemies will shoot or drop stuff out of the back of their car. There are a lot of different enemies to cover here, so I won’t, but as you play you will have to learn how to handle each type of enemy so that you can kill it before it does too much damage to you. For instance in the first world, there are motorcycles that can only shoot in front of them, so if you see motorcycles you should slam on the brakes and get behind them so you can easily take them out. When killed, enemies will drop one of 5 things, either money, health, ammo (for your secondary weapon), charge (for your ability), or a schematic. Schematics unlock a new item in the shop, but it is randomized, so you might just get a new spoiler, or you might get a new weapon. There are a set amount of schematics that are allowed to drop between boss fights, so you won’t end up getting the best weapon in the game, before you beat the 2^nd boss.

As you progress, obviously the enemies get tougher, do more damage or require a differing strategy as to how to beat them that isn’t just shoot them in the back. When you are truly clicking with the game you will be linking power-slides to shoot one car at an angle, and then when it’s destroyed, immediately doing a 180 so you can shoot at cars coming up behind you. You are going to get lots of practice doing these levels, because…

This game is hard! It is meant to be hard, and that might come as a surprise to you as it did to me. The first world I beat on my first try, including the head-boss before figuratively crashing into a wall on the 2^nd boss and dying to him 5 or 6 times in a row. While your car can take a beating, the damage persists through the entire world (2 stages + boss) so if you are taking a lot of damage by regular enemies, you are going to have to fight a boss with half health.

Death itself is pretty painless, as you keep any money you have earned, schematics you have picked up, etc, however you are sent back to your shop and will have to do the whole world over again, assuming you died at the boss. That means that you can re-tool, buy new upgrades or swap weapons and get right back to it, hopefully having learned a little something from the first death. This is what I mean by getting lots of practice. When I finished the game I came just under 40 deaths, and while there is no stat for it, I would bet you that less then 5 of those deaths happened during non-boss fights. That means I was playing those non boss missions over and over again, just to get another shot at the boss.

During certain aspects of the regular stages, and much more likely during boss stages is where this game briefly touches on the bullet-hell genre. There are points where you are going to have to slip between bullets in order to avoid taking massive damage or to get close enough to damage the boss depending on what car setup you have. The bosses themselves are massive enemies that nearly take up the full screen, and range from a tank, to a wrecking ball truck, to a train, and helicopter, etc. All said there are only 9 bosses that you need to fight, but the thought is that you will be attempting them multiple times.

This is where customization can be so interesting as to how you tackle each boss. For instance there was a boss that was causing me strife because I was being lit up by a turret while I was shooting it, after many attempts I switched up my tactics so that I brought a shotguns, and a decoy charge. The decoy only last 15seconds, but when I got to the turret section, I deployed it and then got right in its face and unloaded my shotguns in it until it died. I watched someone else take apart that boss, with machine guns who was just better at dodging then me. For the most part, whatever makes you comfortable is how you can outfit your car.

After you beat a boss, you will never have to face it again. Through other missions you might have to drive through that faction area again, but won't be met with a boss at the end. Clear the map stages two times (without the boss) and you have purged the area of the faction. This means that you no longer will have to fight in that area again, because later missions might have you start 2 or 3 worlds away from the boss you are going after, and should those areas already be cleaned up, you are starting at the world you need to be in.

It is possible to “outlast” a boss. Each boss level is technically timed, as in the bottom right corner of the screen you can see how close your car is to reaching the goal of the area. Should you last that long without killing the boss or being killed, you technically beat the delivery mission, but the boss remains. That means every time you have to drive through that area, you will still have to square off with the boss until you beat it, also if you are looking to beat the game you need to kill the first 8 bosses before the 9^th opens up.

I found this game incredibly addicting and what makes this game so addicting is that the runs are short enough that you can tell yourself you have time for just one more, or if you were close to the boss that you can kill it if you try it one more time. Each level’s run time is maybe 5 minutes, so to take on a single world would be roughly 15 minutes, which is nothing. I also rarely felt that the game was being cheap on any of my deaths, and they usually stemmed from me being impatient or not paying attention. If you are locked in and have learned patterns of your enemies it is entirely possible to handle everything the game is throwing at you with barely a scratch on your car. The final boss took me an agonizing long time (over 10 tries), but I always felt I was getting a little bit better at each approach, to the point where when I finally beat him, it was on a run where I didn’t take any damage during the first 2/3^rd of it's health bar.

The good news is for people who perhaps don’t want to beat their head against the wall, there is a range of difficulty options that you can tweak, but I don’t have much experience as I played on standard and adjusted nothing from the start to the finish. You can select a difficulty, and then tweak a damage modifier so that you can dial in the difficulty you like best. I am incredibly curious about the permadeath mode, but that sounds like something for true masochists. Even knowing a strategy for the whole game, I highly doubt I could do a no death run through the game. Also nothing would feel worse then being 4-5 bosses in and die because you got a bad break and you have to start all over.

Now this game probably won’t be for everyone, and I understand that. I also hate arguing price, but I could see this game entering into that conversation at the $25 steam price it is currently on, but it was certainly worth it for me. My recommendation for this game is simple. Watch 5 minutes of gameplay on YouTube, skip to a random spot in the video, and if it looks like its for you, then get it. This isn’t a game that changes up its core loop an hour in, it’s also not a game that throws a bunch of different systems at you either. It would be a game that plays great as an arcade cabinet, it’s simple to explain once you see it in motion, easy to pickup and play, but relatively high skill ceiling to attempt to master. At just the right length, I can come off of completing the game pretty stoked about the game, rather then wondering why I’m still playing it 20 hours in.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: I really enjoyed this game, and it truly did feel like playing an arcade game port on the console. This is one of the games that makes me glad that I sometimes buy random games without knowing much about them. I could 100% see this as a game that Dan or Jeff Grubb champion for about 1 week and then move on and you never hear about it again. It isn't the best game you will be talking about all year, but it will satisfy you for a good weekend or week. I have ranked GearShifters as the 35th Greatest Game out of 133 games. It sits above "River City Girls" (36th) and below "Legend of Zelda" (34th).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening