Assault Android Cactus

This game deserve more love. Very good twistick shooter. Plenty of different characters, each with different playstyle. A lot of fun played alone or with friends. The ranking system pushes you to play better. Or you can just enjoy the mayhem. Boss fight are doable but challenging, especially if you want to get hi-scores.

The following is a transcript for a full video review (available on YouTube) I did of this game: I am extremely pleased to cover today the 2015 indie title: Assault Android Cactus. Initially launched for PC platforms and ported to PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch over the course of the next 4 years, I've been playing this sorely underrated gem since I could get my no-hands on it. Imagine my surprise to learn that it was made by basically a three-man team called Witch Beam, located in Brisbane, Australia. And I'm just going to preemptively apologize because I'm probably going to pronounce their names wrong, per usual, but here goes anyway: Tim Dawson is credited as head artist and programmer as well as co-designer, Jeff van Dyck created all the sounds and music you'll hear, and Sanatana Mishra not only was chief designer, but was kind enough to respond to me bugging them for an interview. The story opens when Intergalactic Police Officer, Cactus, approaches the spaceship Genki Star, and is fired upon for her trouble. Reasoning the best entrance is a, uh, quick one, she slams her ship headlong into the cargo bay, where she meets Lemon, Holly, and Coral. Coral is not a plant but whatever. Together with Cactus, these make up the first 4 of the 9 playable androids in the game, with more unlocking as you progress into the game. Cactus then learns that the core ship is being taken over by a rogue AI and their only hope is to traverse an army of berserk robots and a journey over 3 kilometers long to get to the core and find out what's gone wrong. Along the way they'll encounter tricks, traps, enemies of all types, and unexpected rivals and allies! First off, this game looks AMAZING. Seriously, I cannot say enough nice things about just how GOOD this game looks! Even in the intro cutscene, there's textures across Cactus's armor... Armor? Or is that her body? Never mind, not thinking about it any further. Anyway, everything just looks polished – literally and figuratively. Since the game takes place on a spaceship, the things that are supposed to be metallic have this lustrous sheen to them. The androids – gynoids? Whatever – look very cute, very much inspired by anime of similar styles. They all have this cute big-head, super deformed look about them which definitely gives them an endearing quality. And the animations are silky-smooth, enemies and heroes alike. They're just so cute! I just want to protect them! Especially Holly, but that's just me. Look, they even made her armor green and her hair red, like the plant! That's a super nice touch. And the sound design is out of this world. I adore the OST in this game. It has this really up-tempo, kind of aggressive rock-techno fusion. Honestly, I wish I knew more about music because the soundtrack in this game is SO GOOD! It's precisely the sort of thing that cute android girls shooting up evil robots should be set to. And since all the characters use guns or gun-like things at least, the sound effects are REALLY good too. It gives the already fast-paced game a sort of feeling of “you want to go fast because it's fun to go fast” kind of vibe. Mechanically the game is fundamentally a twin-stick shooter. You move with the left stick and aim with the right, firing by holding the right trigger and swapping to your subweapon with the left trigger. If I were to issue complaint, it's super weird to me that every single D-Pad input acts as the “Back” button, even in the menus. But that's such a tiny nitpick. The overall gameplay is super fast, as I've implied about a dozen times now, with your android girl of choice moving across the maps and shooting everything that moves and a few things that don't. The caveat that makes this really interesting to me is that just taking damage and getting knocked out is NOT the end of your run. Instead, you're on a timer, represented by the androids's batteries. So, as long as you HAVE energy, you can get back up again and resume the level from where you got knocked down. Therefore you progress primarily by destroying enemies and collecting power-ups, like temporary options that fire when you do, wings that make you run fast, an emergency shutdown that deactivates all nearby enemies and lowers their defense, and lastly, battery extenders to keep you alive and going. The game is broken up into about 25 main levels across the campaign mode, broken up further by larger-than-life boss battles, each with numerous phases where their tactics change. I adore these in particular as a pinnacle of the game's masterful design, but even a regular level is still both a feat for the eyes and for the gameplay experience. But the game hardly ends there. There's also the Daily Dive, where a generated challenge run awaits you. There's the fiendishly difficult 50-part layer mode, boss rush, and more. And since the game can be enjoyed solo or with up to 4 friends in local co-op, there's no reason not to find hours of replay and excitement therein. Very much recommended.

This game is an all timer in the twin stick shooter genre. It has plenty of characters with unique weapons, and special attacks. It has great enemy variety. It's full of color and character. I hope this game gets another day in the sun, because it deserves many more players than it ever received.