Everyday Shooter - PS3 Network review

Finally. After two years and a lineup of wannabes as long as Tommy Lee’s… list of sexual partners, there’s finally a top-down arcade shooter worthy of being compared to the 360’s amazingly compelling neon-and-techno laserathon,Geometry Wars Evolved. It’s just as colorful, just as fresh, just as likely to infect you with the “just one more game” fever, and even more unique despite a charmingly humble, wildly inaccurate name: Everyday Shooter.

On paper, Everyday Shooter seems typical. You are a small, haloed diamond-thing that moves around the screen with the left analog stick and belches pulsating destruction in whatever direction you point the right stick. Mostly abstract geometric shapes begin to drift by, and you blow them up. It’s standard gameplay copied straight from the Big Book of Top-down, Two-stick Arcade Shooters written by Robotron 2084 back in 1982.

Except it’s not. Not even close. As you start pumping hot geometric death into the various shapes around you, you’ll immediately notice that every direct hit adds a note to the churning guitar music in the background. Neat. Then you kill a larger enemy, and a chord is struck. Then, you blast one particular enemy and it blossoms into an explosion that causes any enemy it touches to explode as well, and any enemy that touches that explosion blows up to, and so on, leaving a mosaic of blinking white dots that you collect for points.