Thanks to MK Games for the review code
Title: Project X: Light Years
System: Steam
Price: $24.99
Release Date: 08/15/2025
Story
In this sequel to the 90s Amiga shooter, you take control of one of three ships as they set out across the galaxy to stop an alien invasion. The original Project X didn’t really have much of a plot, and outside of a prologue and between level images showing the impending invasion, Light Years doesn’t have one either.
That isn’t a bad thing, of course. Shooters aren’t meant to have a story, and despite this being a sequel to an Amiga game, you can easily jump in with this one without needing to know whatever tiny bit of lore the original shooter had. I just find it neat that after Alien Breed got a modern reboot, we have another T17 game getting one.
Presentation
Project X on the Amiga didn’t really offer much of a presentation outside of some lovely pixel art and a cool title tune, considering how it was yet another of those Amiga games that didn’t allow for both sound effects and music to be playing at the same time. Still, it looked great for the time, especially compared to other home computer shooters.
Here with Light Years, the game is now 2.5D, using 3D models on a 2D plane, and it manages to look pretty decent. The 3D models are fine enough, representing the older sprite art pretty faithfully, and the backgrounds do a good job fitting the vibes of that original game, too. There’s also music playing during the actual levels now, although unfortunately hardly any of it is memorable, easily being the weakest part of the presentation by far, though I will give props for the original title and loading themes being kept and remixed really faithfully, with the option to even shift to the original Amiga versions if you so please. Just a shame the newer music is unimpressive.
Another pleasant surprise comes from how Light Years is pretty well optimized for the Steam Deck, fitting within the 1200 x 800 window and coming with a preset that has the game running without much issue. The only sort of performance annoyance I came across was the occasional microstutter, usually whenever I’d fire the burst shot or something big blew up, but this sort of microstutter is an issue I’ve seen often in other PC ports for the past few years, so I’m not sure much can be done to fix it with whatever engine is being used.
At the very least, the game remained responsive and fun to play. Entering your local high score name is rather awkward since the keyboard has to be brought up manually, but otherwise controlling the game on Steam Deck was a non-issue as well.
Gameplay
Project X Light Years is a horizontal shooter that takes the original concept of Project X, which was pretty much just a Gradius-like on Amiga, and brings that into the modern age with several different custom difficulty/gameplay options to help make it stand out more from being a mid-tier Gradius Clone like the original.
You have ten stages to go through in this shooting adventure, and can play the game in several modes that change things around a bit. There’s a Project X 1992 mode, which just has you playing one of the three ships with the original Project X Amiga rules, where you shoot down enemies, collect powerup icons and redeem them for new weapons ala Gradius, and this is where I originally started with Light Years, mainly to familiarize myself with it and compare it to the original version I had access to via Evercade.
Indeed, you have decent enemy layouts, albeit in really long stages that take a while to go through, and the classic structure still works relatively well. You can upgrade a powerup more than once to make it stronger, and the max amount of upgrades depends on which ship you pick, since each ship lets you upgrade certain weapons more than the others. Such weapons vary from a homing missile, a side shot, to powerful laser and magma beams that can cripple bosses when upgraded several times over, just like in the original.
One of the first things new to Light Years is the addition of perfect checkpoints, where clearing out all the enemies in a wave before reaching the next checkpoint makes it “perfect”. Doing this through the end of the stage will reward you with an extra little ranking star at the end of the level, along with various other tasks per stage. Most of these I found to be incredibly tedious and not worth doing, but I did enjoy the battles that would take place in black holes, where you’d often fight multiple toughened up minibosses at once and get a good challenge out of it.
Then there’s the modern game mode, which still takes most of the Project X gameplay elements while remixing a few things and adding some new mechanics that help to make the game a lot easier, even if you’re playing on the lowest difficulty setting. (There are quite a lot of difficulty options here, but I didn’t really find many of the ones above the default one to be that compelling or a well-balanced challenge)
Your powerup meter is locked from being at maximum in the Modern mode, so you now have a shop system where you collect green orbs dropped throughout each stage, along with the words ARMOURY in order to redeem them at the end of the stage for an extra powerup slot. I really didn’t like the fact that you were suddenly gated from getting max power from traditional powerup icons and now had to go through a shop system relying on missable letter icons, so that alone made me vastly prefer the 1992 mode option.
But there were a few other quality of life aspects that made the modern mode decently enjoyable, such as a charging burst shot that deals massive damage along with a rechargable shield to help you deal with projectiles without everything being a one hit death. You also have an extra subweapon that can be used a limited amount of times, and each ship has their own unique version that helps add a bit more variety to the ships besides their speed and powerup limits.
What might be the most headscratching difference, and the weakest point of the game by far to me, is how in any mode besides the 1992 one, you can’t seem to continue from where you left off at all. Sure, you have the option to select the newest stage you reached and play it, but upon completing it you just have it marked as a single stage score attack run, to be uploaded either to the online leaderboards or a local one if you choose to switch to one. You can’t just play Stage 3 and then move to Stage 4 from there, you have to start from the beginning of the game and beat the game on limited continues.
Which, I don’t really mind as a concept, since I do tend to prefer limited/no continue options myself in shooters, but I still do like the option of at least putting down a shooter to resume at a later time. Whether that be via a stage select or just suspending a run to let you resume later with the same limited continues you have remaining, I’d have really preferred that option for the modern gameplay modes. Bizarrely, it appears playing in 1992 mode lets you continue the main game via the stage select if you so wish, simply by starting at the last stage you reached. I don’t know why you can’t do it in the modern mode or even suspend a current run to resume later, but that’s a weird design choice I wasn’t quite fond of. Considering the stages are rather long, playing this in breaks is a lot more enjoyable than trying to marathon it.
Nevertheless, with my preference for the classic mode, I really did find a good bit of fun out of Light Years just like I did with the Amiga original. I didn’t find the scoring to be as addicting as that original game and thus didn’t even bother trying to play Light Years for points, (maybe a caravan/score focused stage would be a solution?) but as a euroshmup and followup to a 30+ year old game, this was still quite fun.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Project X Light Years is a surprisingly fun throwback to the Amiga original, and a worthy followup. While I did worry at first that it would end up trying to copy the Amiga original without any of the fun factors that game had to offer, I’m happy to say Light Years offers more variety and depth than I had expected. From the different difficulty modes and gameplay styles, this is just more Project X with modern euroshump fun to it.
Really the only major downsides I found with this game were a couple of things; the aforementioned microstutter, the music being incredibly lackluster, the baffling continue/progression system on the modern gameplay modes, and the very long stages with no suspend option that the original Project X dealt with, too. Cloud saves would also be a nice addition for the sake of improving the Steam Deck experience further, since it plays pretty darn well on the device.
Still, if you liked how the original Project X was and had fond memories of that, Light Years is a bigger, nicer follow up to it, keeping the spirit of that original Amiga game intact. Whether that’s a good or bad thing for you depends on your views of euro shooters in general, but Light Years nails the vibe of the original game and refines those ideas to be a lot more fun, even if I think the scorechasing elements are a little bit weaker.
It might be rather pricey, but if you like Project X, Light Years is well worth picking up, even if it offers a different taste of shmup compared to your usual Japanese style ones.
I give Project X: Light Years a 6 out of 10.