Spacewing War [Xbox]

Developed by Pneuma Games and EastAsiaSoft, Spacewing War is a retro shoot-‘em-up where you must defend against the onslaught of invaders from the Planet Mavros. It’s a side-scrolling, very gameboy/8-bit era game, with a few different game modes to play. The first - Story Mode - is the only one unlocked to begin with, and the other four locked sections are: Challenge Mode, which - as you’d expect - offers a greater challenge than the main mode, with far more enemies to go up against; Uufoo’s Quest, where you play as one of the UFO enemies, who thinks he may have left his oven on so needs to rush home to check (though weirdly this is almost the same game but as a different character, with a different ending); Break the Targets, a timed target hunting mini-game with a bunch of levels to complete; and finally, Boss Horde; there’s also a completion percentage meter in the bottom right of the main screen, which is always a handy thing to keep track of.

You have access to different weapons that can be swapped between, ranging from a standard single-shot, split-shot, bombs and boomerang style, though for the most part we both stuck with the split-shot - Allan found that the bombs proved to be very useful against bosses; though the damage that they inflict upon you if they explode too close to you is a bit of a hazard, and not one that I’m fast enough at reacting to risk! There are pickups spread out in the levels, and these can add to your health as well as allow you to have extra protection in the form of a large shield, or increase the strength of your weapons, which is useful as enemies tend to take more than one hit otherwise. The environment layouts are quite dangerous too, with lots of hard corners and tight corridors to pass through - and the auto-scroll can lead this to be the biggest danger of all.

Really liked this colour scheme… but it doesn’t appear to be in any of the available options…

The visuals are very simple, with almost everything feeling very flat - there’s no animation for your spaceship, instead simply moving around the screen which ends up appearing slightly jerky; enemies have basic animations, which makes a huge difference compared to the somewhat bland ship. You can adjust the colour palette, with 50 different options available - though some of these are more visually pleasing than others (and less of a pain on the retinas!). We did notice that there was an issue with some parts of the environment blending into the background too much, and this seemed to persist across most of the colour variations.

There’s an unbelievably repetitive tune within the main menu, which is on a mega short loop that completely bores itself into your brain. The music within the levels themselves is no better sadly, with tracks that feel awkwardly disconnected from the action, and also end up swamped by the constant shooting from your ship. Some of the sound effects do feel very ‘authentically’ retro, but on the whole, the sound design just feels a little off.

We ran into a couple of issues during our time with Spacewing War, including a couple of crashes and odd glitches that seemed to reset the game back to 0% completion each time a new mode was completed (though this could be resolved by exiting out and rebooting, thankfully), but nothing totally game-breaking, just a lot of frustration when the game crashes and requires a full reset right before the end of a mode. It’s a simple, retro styled game that does what it says on the tin - but that’s just not quite enough to satisfy.

Priced at £5.79 on Xbox, though currently with a reduction bringing it down to £4.63 for a limited time, Spacewing War is a cheap enough title for the amount of gameplay you’ll get across the various modes - but sadly, is lacking in personality which is a bit of a shame. The additional game modes do give it a little more replayability, though this is marred by the fact that it feels like you’re just replaying the same game over and over again across the bulk of the modes, with very slight differences.

In the end, we decided to give Spacewing War the Collecting Asylum rating of 5.5/10.

Are you interested in Spacewing War? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to EastAsiaSoft for the Spacewing War Xbox review code!