UBERMOSH

By the time I was a kid arcades were becoming a thing of the past, if they weren't a thing of the past already. Growing up in the late 1990's meant that I was too young to experience the great communal arcade halls of legend so I had to seek shelter in every bowling alley, movie theater, and smoke filled restaurant closet in existence that held the remaining, public. As a small child, you had to risk life and limb, talking to the creepy middle aged guy behind the counter who's slightly balding, but still tries to work a mullet, so he can take you to a bizarre David Lynch inspired 'back room' with one Centipede cabinet underneath a lone flickering light bulb. Yes, I might have been scared for my life, but I'll be damned if I didn't spend hours behind that joystick, trying to beat the high score of every horny trucker, pot head and divorcee who bothered to play that machine. Fast forward to 2015 and I'm not entirely certain if those rooms exist any more, but if they did, Ubermosh would be an insanely popular hit.

The concept of this game is simple; the world has become so pure that the only form of entertainment people can gain is from violence. The players one goal is to fight their way out of a Hunger Games-like colosseum. This is as much story and canon that the developer, Walter Machado, gives you and I suppose that is all you really need.

Before I begin nitpicking the ins and outs of Ubermosh, let me make this incredibly clear, THIS IS A FUN GAME. The gameplay itself is condensed enough for anyone to understand and pick up and play in quick doses, just like a traditional arcade game. You get thrown into a top down bullet hell shooter with a sword that can reflect/cut through bullets and are forced to survive giant waves of bizarre enemies for about 90 seconds. This game sounds and looks like it was taken from the pages of a rejected John Carpenter screenplay from the 80's in the vein of Big Trouble In Little China, and the better it is for it. The weirder and more difficult Ubermosh gets, the more fun it is to play but this is where my biggest complaint comes to light; the game doesn't evolve much, if at all, from its initial concept.

To start with, the controls of this game are very tight. The response time is incredibly fast and there is just a touch of momentum added to the movement in order to make running feel weighted. That style of movement is very important to keep in mind when engaging in all sorts of combat because there is a small amount of delay when using your weapons in order to prevent spamming it. While some people might take issue with this, I thought it was a nice attempt to balance the combat with the multitude of guns you are bound to pick up through the course of your many playthroughs.

And through using the multitude of guns that you pick off the dead carcasses of your enemies, you have to survive screens filled with aliens all trying to kill you. After I initially launched the game, it took me a solid 20 minutes of repeatedly banging my head into my keyboard before I could last 30 seconds if I was lucky. My perseverance ended up paying off for me because, in the end, my biggest run ended in a score of 169, and I'm still too proud of myself to reset my score in hardcore mode and loose what I worked so hard to achieve. While going on runs that end with beating your high score feels so fantastic, the more runs you go on, the purely skeletal structure of the game reveals itself.

This game could benefit from so much. For example, a larger selection of characters to choose from could add so much depth, adding a screen clearing ultimate ability for the one character you have could turn the tide of so many battles, and taking a minute to create load outs for each run you take can add a certain level of basic strategy, just to name a few. The reason I point these aspects out in particular is because I feel everything needed to add these mechanics is already in the game, but their absence makes the game feel disappointingly empty. Of course, the hope is that additional layers will be added in future updates, as long as Walter Machado continues to support his solid game, but there hasn't been any updates of note made at the time of this review.

For the purpose of covering all bases here, I do have to make a remark on the graphics. If I haven't hinted at it already, this game looks like the love child of the cover from REO Speedwagon's Hi-Infedelity and Joss Whedon's Serenity. The actual gameplay is built in your typical “X-Bit” style of almost every indie game out today, but the menu art and character portraits are very well done with a lot of bright colors thrown all over the place. If this game existed in an arcade cabinet form, it would belong in the corner next to the bathroom of a seedy underground night club with flashy strobe lights where everyone wears neon glow sticks and does cocaine, or a laser tag arena. In a stylistic sense, Ubermosh achieves what it is trying to pull off, and pulls it off well.

So, without any further ado...

TL;DR : While built on a rock hard foundation of solid mechanics and masochistically addictive game-play, Ubermosh offers little more than its neon drenched looks.

To take a page from the Needle Drop, Anthony Fantano,

I'm feeling a strong 2 to a light 3 on this...

Cheers!