RPM – Road Punk Mayhem asks the question what would a vertical shoot em up feel like if the aesthetic and theming matched a cel shaded Mad Max vehicular desert dystopia. It wasn’t a question I initially had in my mind but seeing it come to fruition made me excited to see what a bullet hell game in this vein would play like. I’m sad to report that RPM is a very mixed bag.
Road Punk Mayhem comes from Panda Indie Studio, a small developer that specialises in garish, loud but usually tightly designed shmups. They are priced at a budget and deliver quickfire thrills and scoreboard envy rather than long extravagant experiences. The same thought process applies here with 5 levels, this time without Panda’s usual randomisation of units, and 5 giant bosses to kill. This standardisation helps the online leaderboards feels fairer and I welcome the change. You choose from three pilots to drive your car out on an endless road and each pilot has a different weapon. One shoots a narrow bullet ahead, one is a slightly slower spread bullet and the third is a slow but powerful homing missile. To fire these weapons you need to continuously tap fire but if you hold down fire they all revert to a single thin laser beam. As the base weapons can be upgraded in your run via powerup pickups, I found I was more powerful using my base attack but its sometimes more comfortable to revert to a laser.
The second element of Road Punk Mayhem is warping. Levels send screen wide barriers at you, or bosses send walls of electricity to kill and you need to warp through them to not get hurt. When warping you press a button to enter a timed warp phase and can move anywhere within a set perimeter and then press warp again to reappear. The ability can’t be spammed too much though the area you can warp within needs to recharge and grow, making it a tactical rhythmic decision. I enjoyed the idea of warping but the execution is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes visually I’d be clear of danger but get hurt. Othertimes I’d always get hurt regardless of where I warped too. It implies you are invincible but that’s often not the case and as the warp’s rules are never explained I found it faffy and frustrating to use. This is exasperated further by the angular cel shaded graphics. When rings of danger fly out, they move through multiple frames like a lightning bolt and when you are working in tiny spaces, often you look safe but you aren’t or its just too tricky to tell. Its one of those fundamental design issues where two selling points conflict against each other. Making fuzzy angular sidestepping cel shaded graphics the thing you need to avoid with rhythmic pixel perfect perfection may not have been the best idea…
This issue seeps through most of the gameplay. The stylised graphics are fine but often lead to death because its difficult to make out what is safe. The actual shooting and central collision detection for bullet hell moments that are clear work a treat though. The soundtrack is 80s heavy rock hair metal goodness. Online leaderboards give incentive to play on. The bosses all do something different. It isn’t as if Panda Indie Studio forgot how to make a good shmup, its just this has some fundamental design clashes that frustrate rather than engross.
I’d heavily recommend Project Starship X as the best that this studio has put out to date. It takes all that’s good from RPM and delivers it with more of everything, smoother. This is a shoot em up I can only recommend to genre completionists.
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