Solaroids: Prologue is a twin stick 'SHMUP' (Shoot 'em up) inspired by the 1979 arcade shooter Asteroidsand its 1992 clone Maelstrom. True to its inspiration, Solaroidsbrings forth the classic asteroids experience and advances the concept well to become something unique and creative.
The game features a decent amount of customization and gameplay options, in terms of settings and style. For those who like options, you can play with either a keyboard or controller, and use up to four controllers supported for local co-op.
What is Solaroids Solaroids is a re-imagined version of the classic Asteroids® as a single or local multiplayer shooter that retains the essential premise that inertia is the missing ingredient of many modern top down shooters. Summary: With the same basic controls as the classic Asteroids, you must learn to navigate and fight with inertia ever present. Solaroids is not a game for the twin-stick junkie. Youll need to evolve or perish trying. Take complete control of your vessel, amass advanced weaponry, and take back the stars. Just uploading this for diagnostic purposes. Solaroids: Prologue. A skill-based spectacle of the classics of old with a dash of retro charm and a heaping injection of kick butt adrenaline. Master drift and upgrade your fighter to become the top pilot in the galaxy, or team up with up to three of your comrades and decimate the enemy.
From the intro screen, you're presented with two options: Campaign and Free Play.
Campaign mode begins with Wave One, allowing the player to get into the swing of the game. As the player defeats enemies, the wave indicator in the bottom center of the screen will continue to fill until an alarm sounds, and the screen begins to flash red around the edge. At the end of each wave, a final boss will spawn with increasingly powerful weapons and greater numbers of enemy defenders. Wonderfully, players can upgrade by flying after and catching upgrade modules with their ship. These can range from better weapons, ship modules, points boosts, repair utilities, and so forth.
The first wave consists of small alien warships, consisting of a simple square shape. As the player progresses, more powerful and diverse enemies and upgrades appear. For example, the below screenshot shows a player battling a 'space centipede', being chased by player-seeking killer asteroids (the pointy rocks on the left), while using a rapid fire weapon upgrade and two modules which add additional ship weapons to the side of the player ship.
Earlier, I talked about the co-op feature, so let's dive in to that. Each player flies independently, but the group can select either 'Split Screen' (shown below) to fly off in their own direction and pursue enemies independently or 'Shared Screen' (all players sharing one single screen, as above) to work together. It really depends how you like to play!
Co-op can be customized considerably. Friendly fire can be turned on and off, as can friendly collisions. In both single player and co-op, you can change the background, set the level of parallax and change various gameplay mechanics. I have a fond memory of my wife and I flying in a straight line looking for enemies, and slamming into each other head on 😉 You can choose to shoot through each other…or at each other, to get to the enemy. PS: Some enemies explode, violently, on death. Be ready to fly fast and hard to survive.
The game features a scoreboard, which allows you to track your score against the world – as well as yourself. You begin with three lives, and your score is reset if you exhaust your lives. Minimize how many times you explode in order to compete for the highest score. There are power ups which increase your score and add boosts and bonuses. Enemies have a chance of dropping a repair upgrade, which you must catch if you notice your ship is a little…on fire. As you play, you'll encounter limited use collectible upgrades like homing missiles, plasma explosives which cause an area of effect explosion around your ship, and a more powerful area attack which can destroy most of the smaller enemies in a single blast.
At the end of the tenth wave, the game goes into 'infinity' and now you must survive as long as you can against the full might of the alien armada. This could mean fighting a handful of battle stations, centipedes, floating mines, and more, all at once. You can also jump right into this with Free Play. It's deadly. Keep an eye on your health, ammo and upgrades. Your ship will start burning. You'll want to get repaired, fast.
Solaroids: Prologue is a true pleasure to play. It never gets old, repetitive or boring, especially with friends. Each experience is a little different and you can sense the love and passion the developer has put into the game. Chad Yates is well grounded and wonderful, the ingredients you need in a successful indie developer.
For those who love arcade style games and want to play something with excellent replay value that is well suited for casual play, I highly recommend Solaroids: Prologue.
Rating: 9/10
Solaroids: Prologue
Developer: Chad Yates (DynF/X Digital)
Publisher: Chad Yates (DynF/X Digital)
Webstore Links:
Steam
From the intro screen, you're presented with two options: Campaign and Free Play.
Campaign mode begins with Wave One, allowing the player to get into the swing of the game. As the player defeats enemies, the wave indicator in the bottom center of the screen will continue to fill until an alarm sounds, and the screen begins to flash red around the edge. At the end of each wave, a final boss will spawn with increasingly powerful weapons and greater numbers of enemy defenders. Wonderfully, players can upgrade by flying after and catching upgrade modules with their ship. These can range from better weapons, ship modules, points boosts, repair utilities, and so forth.
The first wave consists of small alien warships, consisting of a simple square shape. As the player progresses, more powerful and diverse enemies and upgrades appear. For example, the below screenshot shows a player battling a 'space centipede', being chased by player-seeking killer asteroids (the pointy rocks on the left), while using a rapid fire weapon upgrade and two modules which add additional ship weapons to the side of the player ship.
Earlier, I talked about the co-op feature, so let's dive in to that. Each player flies independently, but the group can select either 'Split Screen' (shown below) to fly off in their own direction and pursue enemies independently or 'Shared Screen' (all players sharing one single screen, as above) to work together. It really depends how you like to play!
Co-op can be customized considerably. Friendly fire can be turned on and off, as can friendly collisions. In both single player and co-op, you can change the background, set the level of parallax and change various gameplay mechanics. I have a fond memory of my wife and I flying in a straight line looking for enemies, and slamming into each other head on 😉 You can choose to shoot through each other…or at each other, to get to the enemy. PS: Some enemies explode, violently, on death. Be ready to fly fast and hard to survive.
The game features a scoreboard, which allows you to track your score against the world – as well as yourself. You begin with three lives, and your score is reset if you exhaust your lives. Minimize how many times you explode in order to compete for the highest score. There are power ups which increase your score and add boosts and bonuses. Enemies have a chance of dropping a repair upgrade, which you must catch if you notice your ship is a little…on fire. As you play, you'll encounter limited use collectible upgrades like homing missiles, plasma explosives which cause an area of effect explosion around your ship, and a more powerful area attack which can destroy most of the smaller enemies in a single blast.
At the end of the tenth wave, the game goes into 'infinity' and now you must survive as long as you can against the full might of the alien armada. This could mean fighting a handful of battle stations, centipedes, floating mines, and more, all at once. You can also jump right into this with Free Play. It's deadly. Keep an eye on your health, ammo and upgrades. Your ship will start burning. You'll want to get repaired, fast.
Solaroids: Prologue is a true pleasure to play. It never gets old, repetitive or boring, especially with friends. Each experience is a little different and you can sense the love and passion the developer has put into the game. Chad Yates is well grounded and wonderful, the ingredients you need in a successful indie developer.
For those who love arcade style games and want to play something with excellent replay value that is well suited for casual play, I highly recommend Solaroids: Prologue.
Rating: 9/10
Solaroids: Prologue
Developer: Chad Yates (DynF/X Digital)
Publisher: Chad Yates (DynF/X Digital)
Webstore Links:
Steam
When you're ‘the last' of something in a series or a group or anything, be it Airbender, Samurai, of Us1, or any other finality, you carry an incredible weight and hype on your metaphorical shoulders. This is it. There is nothing else to come. You're the final act. And in realizing that realization, suddenly you're expected to not only be good, but even be the best ‘the last' thing to come along. With that knowledge, Solaroids: Prologue ($1.00) is the very last XBLIG, released about a month and a half after the official cutoff date.
Your initial thought is undoubtedly that it's a space shooter, and you'd be correct. By its name, you'd surmise it's a relative or close personal friend of the classic game Asteroids. And you would also be correct. You're ‘2 for 2' now. Then, you'd probably say it has a twin-stick control scheme. And… wrong. You were really close, man. It's indeed a space shooter where you shoot larger asteroids and break them into smaller asteroids, where you (eventually) face down more sophisticated enemies, but if you want to follow the original source material, you're going to need the ‘tank' style turn controls, with the added benefit of forward and reverse thrusters to fine tune your fancy flight and trajectory.
Solaroids Prologue
Gameplay is similarly classic, in that dull, ‘watching paint dry' sort of fashion. In the way back when, Asteroids was exciting stuff, the pinnacle of videogaming. In the modern era, not so much. There's a reason these ‘classics' have turned into free browser games; they're not that revolutionary or involving anymore. That's not to dismiss or discredit these games for their contribution to history, just to state that their idea has been used dozens of times over.
To its credit, Solaroids: Prologue has a better graphic presentation, has power-ups (think shields, faster bullets, ship buddies for added firepower, etc.) and 4-player split screen2. The argument here is that the game is both more fun with and meant to be played with others, and that's probably the case… if local multiplayer is an option for you. By yourself, the classic setup of chasing down asteroids hasn't aged nearly as well. Especially when it requires you shoot so damn many of them to progress.
Enemies do show up the more you play, albeit gradually. Ditto for their size and intelligence and tactics, meaning you'll eventually wander into some challenging firefights that will take full advantage of your acquired power-ups. In that regard, the game sheds its Asteroids origins. Yet with that being said, it's still a generic and tame shooter, from the backgrounds to the gameplay and everything in between. As a ‘prologue' to a perhaps bigger or more fleshed out endgame, you'd almost expect that.
Farming simulator 19 online game. So while Solaroids: Prologue plays and controls well enough, it's a space shooter that you've seen and played well before you've even seen and played it. It's a slow burn to get to the more exciting battles, and even then, your patience isn't going to necessarily be rewarded with anything beyond the ordinary. This is the last XBLIG, and the last space shooter you will play for XBLIG. Despite the sadness of that finality, this game won't be greatly missed.
- You're probably not asking, but I'm telling: The Last Airbender (movie) was terrible, The Last Samurai was pretty good, and The Last of Us was a phenomenal piece of gaming, entertainment, and storytelling. ↩
- In what was a recurring theme for XBLIGs, a lot of the games would benefit from having two or more people around to enjoy couch co-op. Unfortunately, in an era where people are constantly on the move / playing online, you don't necessarily have the controllers or friends in immediate supply. That's not to say that local multiplayer is a bad choice, just not an option that is as prevalent as it was in gaming's past, when it was required. ↩