This week's DEMO is the Steam PC version of Astral Bounty, from developer Weepel Games.
Full disclosure, Weepel Games got in touch about Astral Bounty and brought it to my attention, but i was unable to play the demo before it came out on Steam and what i played was from the store, rather than it being sent to me.
Fans of the channel will know that i'm not great at side scrolling shooters, regardless of whether it's vertical or horizontal, but i'm always up for trying a new one as i'd like to find one that i can improve at and still enjoy playing. i knew that Astral Bounty was going to be tough as it describes itself as "Astral Bounty is a brutally hard 2D arcade sidescroll shooter" on it's Steam Store page, https://store.steampowered.com/app/4952490/Astral_Bounty/.
I didn't finish this demo but that wasn't because it's a bad demo. i was surprised how generous Astral Bounty was with it's checkpoints. one way developers make a game tough is by reducing or completely removing checkpoints. Here, they're optional. the game's store appears several times during the demo stage i played and whilst i could spend my money upgrading my ship, i also had the option to respawn at the store for a price. as i learned how to play the game and got better, i stopped using the first and then second stores as revival spots and could focus on buying upgrades and progressing further into the level.
So whilst the start of the level got easier, it always got tougher as i got further into it. Sometimes this was due to new enemies, sometimes there were level hazards, and there are times when both are combined. But it's not like i could never see a path through, my failure to progress to the end felt more like skill issue rather than the level design being unfair.
Astral Bounty ran smoothly on my old low powered laptop, but there were very short but noticeable hitches in the frame rate when a new song started for the first time. i found the controls responsive, but a couple of the upgradable attacks i tried never seemed to work right so it's possible there could be a bug or two. the game doesn't have a release date on Steam so it could also be quite early into it's development.
As a demo this could be better. at no point do i remember it ever saying that it was a demo. there were no screenshots, no links to get the game, and no trailers showcasing the rest of it. thankfully the demo runs well, controls well, and the restarts are fast. So, as a demo it may not be great, but as a game it seemed all right.
Why not buy me a Vending Machine Bottle of Coffee over on https://ko-fi.com/qtegamers
My Laptop Specifications:
Dell Inspiron 15 3525
16gb RAM
AMD Ryzen 5 5500U 2.10GHz
Integrated Graphics VRAM: 495 MB
