Originally posted April 12th 2015 on the Seafoam Gaming forums

Title: Super Destronaut

System: Wii U (eShop)

Price: $1.99

Release date: 3/19/2015

The main game/story

This is pretty much a Space Invaders clone on Wii U, for a good price. Just like Space Invaders, you move around at the bottom of the screen, firing at the enemies on the top before they shoot you.

Graphics

Staying true to Space Invaders, the graphics are very, very simplistic, just like it was back in those times. Besides the addition of color (Which Space Invaders didn’t originally have) and a simple menu, there’s not much difference in the visuals.

Music and Sound:

Unlike Space Invaders, this game actually has music, really good music in fact! Some of the tunes that play during your games can range from very catchy to epic, all while keeping that retro feel to them, showing how the developer pretty much knew how to make a game feel retro.

Gameplay

There are three modes in this game to choose from when starting up the game. Classic mode is the main mode where you keep playing until you lose all of your ships, Time Attack is a race against time to get the best score, and multiplayer is pretty much a timed contest with a friend for points. While this game does have power up items (Which appear when you defeat the “boss enemy” of each stage) to change things up, the modes still all play the same.

Classic mode and Time Attack both have the same goal of getting the best high score, though with the lack of any leaderboards (It only saves your best score), it’s pretty much pointless even when posting your highest scores to miiverse. Multiplayer is pretty much the same idea except that when you get hit your multiplier resets, instead of losing a ship, but since it doesn’t even save the highest score from this mode, it’s still a boring experience.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Super Destronaut aims to be a homage to Space Invaders, and it does that job quite well. Unfortunately when Space Invaders didn’t have that much depth to begin with, and with the lack of any “must have” additions in this game, it’s pretty basic at best. It may not cost that much money ($1.99), but in my opinion it’s still overly simplistic. If it just had local leaderboards like older arcade games, it would be a perfect game for Miiverse, allowing you to share your best high scores with ease. I give Super Destronaut a 5 out of 10, and only recommend it to fans of classic space shooters who won’t mind the repetitive nature of this game and the lack of any leaderboards.

Thanks to Petite games for the review code.