Have you ever played a game and thought afterwards that absolutely everything it does is completely devoid of character, interest, engagement or reward? It isn’t the kind of thing I throw around lightly but when I finished after just 25 minutes of Deep Space Rush, I had already grown overtired of its poor gameplay and terribly boring game mechanics. Was it cheap? Yes. Did I stay for the easy platinum? Yes. Do I regret it? Yes.
In Deep Space Rush you will move through room after room side scrolling through an endless alien ship full of spikes, jumps, guns and enemies. Initially a room will contain the odd spike or jump but after a few enemies appear and charge at you. Kill them and clear rooms to gain coins which when you die, you can then spend on character and weapon upgrades for your next run. Rouge-lite is just about what you can call it as the weapon unlocks do indeed make things easier for you, as to increased health and ammo limits. It is just so, so tedious in the playing.
Each room will pull down a wall and often enemies get stuck on the wrong side. Sometimes the bomb enemies explode and take out the floor with them so it ends your run early as you can’t jump across. Often spikes and collision detection is glitchy and says you’ve been hit when really you are wrestling with floaty and inconsistent controls. There is a strange delay to your movement that makes every twitch you make floaty. That doesn’t matter early on but get 20 rooms in and you are expected to precision jump over spikes and flames and it makes the game a very frustrating chore to tackle. You should be working with the game, not fighting it.
The difficulty ramps up to the point where it just sticks loads of guns on the ceiling that will wear your health down and kill you over time. It is cheap game design, thrown into a random world generator that doesn’t understand the subtly of level design or a consistent difficulty curve. Those random rooms all feel very similar after ten minutes as only a few elements seem to rotate and change around. Difficulty increases equates to ‘you dealt with four enemies, now try six’ and it doesn’t feel well thought through at all.
Literally the only up side to the cheapness is that you get cross buy with the PS Vita if you are a Sony console owner for two platinum trophies you can get by grinding away at this soulless mess for about 25 minutes each. By the end of that I was done, bored, exhausted and didn’t want to touch it with a bargepole. Avoid.
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