Review – Jamestown 0

by Adam Blue • Reviews

Jamestown is a SHMUP you can buy on Steam that is completely awesome. That’s my review.

I will elaborate on this to try and entice people to play that normally wouldn’t play shmups. The graphics look like something straight out of the SNES/Genesis era. Pixelation heaven. Maybe a more refined look though – like games that stuck with 2D hand-drawn graphics when everyone else went 3D. This old-school feel goes with animations, effects, and music. The music…wow. It’s a bit like orchestrated music, and at first I wasn’t too keen on it. But it fit in perfectly with the theme, being that you are on a new frontier. It’s Mars, but with a twist…let me explain.

It’s the 1600′s and the Spanish/English are colonizing Mars. It doesn’t explain how or why, and I didn’t even bother asking, so we’ll just leave it at that. You are with a group of English colonists, riding on hover ships of some kind. You go through the levels fighting back at the conquistadors and Martians. Yeah, that’s pretty epic.

But this strange and unfamiliar setting really works with the music, like I mentioned earlier. It’s fantastic. It’s further reinforced by the amazing gameplay. It’s a basic SHMUP by nature, but each ship has a special weapon that is unlimited. It gives you different things to do while playing, which helps depending on the enemy. Then you have ‘Vaunt’ which you get by, I believe, grabbing a bunch of gold quickly (enemies leave this behind). It creates a temporary shield, allowing you to get out of sticky situations. Your normal weapons, special weapon, and vaunt are the three ingredients used to efficiently complete a level.

There are many difficulty levels, but later levels require beating previous ones on a harder difficulty. I like this, as it is a built-in trainer in a way. I did get myself to the last level…it is a beast! But I’m sure just more playing and focus will get me through it. Then there are bonus levels with neat objectives, like score attack and survival. You also get gold that you an use to buy more ships and game types. And also, to round it all out, 4-player co-op.

It’s sub-$10 on Steam, GamersGate, and D2D. Buy it. It’s awesome. It seems like something Treasure could have put together. These guys are good.

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