Pester: Indie Game Review

I have to admit I was eager to try Pester; I've always been something of a fan of 2D shooters, although admittedly I've also never been particularly good at them. The box art for Pester reads "Welcome to bullet heaven". If you're a fan of shmups like this, you will probably have heard the term 'bullet hell', and so will immediately be expecting a bit of a challenging one with this game.


On starting up Pester, you are presented with an obnoxiously pixelated Flump Studios logo, and the immediate pounding of a techno beat. It then shows you a great little 'winners' splash screen mimicking the anti-drug start-up of iconic early 90's arcade titles, before chucking you straight onto the title screen. No intro, no story - but that's fine, as what's been offered so far has set a good tone for the rest of the game.

Pester is a bit of a mish-mash of styles - it's something of a lovechild between the old and the new. Visually, Pester draws on old-school shooters like Galaga, while in gameplay it draws more on the modern bullet hell shooter, featuring huge numbers of enemy projectiles on screen at once. Although odd, it actually works really well; controls are tight and responsive and the retro theme and techno music work in tandem and manage to create a very absorbing atmosphere.

The playable area is the height of the screen but only a portion of the width of your screen is used. This emulates the rotated monitor setup of many arcade shmups, and while the 'wasted space' may disappoint genre newcomers, it will provide an authentic arcade feel to others. This is further emphasised by the arcade scanlines feature, which is turned on by default. The whole experience is geared up to feel very much like an arcade game.


The game offers very good value for money too, with an awful lot of customisation possible. The boxart suggests that there are over 95 combinations of play, although I expect most (including myself) won't see a lot of these as extra content and game modes are unlocked by meeting certain criteria through gameplay. There are two main game modes - Arcade and Tempus. Arcade has your standard shooter rules, where you have to score as much as you can with 3 lives, and killing enemies rewards you with coins for extra bonus points. Tempus mode however pits you against a timer, and replaces the coins from enemy drops with little clocks, each of which adds a second to your timer. You have infinite lives, but each time you die you lose ten seconds, and once the timer hits zero it's game over. Within these two game modes, you can set a lot of options and this is where the real customisation comes into play. You get to choose different modes, modifiers and settings, and can mix and match between all of them. Modes include Classic, Survival, Astroid Belt and Boss Mode, while modifiers such as Duo and reversed controls provide extra challenge, giving you a 1.5x score multiplier for turning each feature on. 'Duo Mode' is a mode for people to really punish themselves, as it puts you in charge of a second ship controlled by the right analogue stick. This mode can be infuriating, but I think if you had a second person use the other analogue stick, you could get a pretty good score - although you would obviously be a dirty little cheater. Overlay settings allow you to disable the default scanlines, remove the overlay, change the background or change the music.

And if all this doesn't keep you going, achievement-junkies will also be pleased to know you also have six in-game awards. While these obviously won't add to your gamerscore, they are earned just like achievements, and range from scoring X amount of points in a certain game mode, to unlocking all game modes. Be warned though, some of these are brutal!


There are actually a lot of shmups on the Indie Games service, but due to these being generally fairly simplistic games, a lot of them are dull, lifeless games, and not really worth your time. Thankfully, Pester does plenty of things right! Firstly, there is a decent array of enemy and bullet sprites, which keeps things interesting. There is also a nice mixture of weaponry for the player to use; your standard laser is upgradeable as you play and you have a supply of smart bombs for when you get overrun. The coins mentioned earlier build up your hyper meter - when full you can unleash hell on your enemies for a few seconds with a super-duper laser powerup! Bosses are included, and they do a good job of breaking up the action and stopping it from becoming too repetitive. The hit-box is nice and small, allowing bullets to graze your ship without hurting you, and avoiding any unfair deaths where you "could of sworn the bullet was nowhere near you". The enemy shooting patterns also never seems to unfairly trap you - if you die it is usually your own poor hand-eye co-ordination that led to your demise.

Pester has very few obvious downfalls, but of course no game is perfect! The one thing that did have me cursing was the invisible walls. There is a small invisible barrier on both sides and the bottom of the screen, and running into these will cause your ship to stop dead prematurely, meaning if you were moving away from a bullet, you're probably a goner. Of course you do get used to these boundaries, but I did have a few deaths that felt a bit cheap as a result of this. The only other features I would perhaps want to see in this game are co-op play and online leaderboards, but realistically not having those doesn't degrade the experience in any way.

Overall, this is a really smart, well presented little game for both retro fans and shmup fans alike. The game has a serious 'just one more go' factor to it, and can't be faulted on its customisation and value for money. It's hard, but not so hard that it's a turn off. It's only 80 Microsoft Points - my advice is to buy it now!

Score 9/10

Website

xbox.com link

Trailer:


A code was kindly provided by Flump Studios for this review.

nice review waggles matey!

Great review, I'm like yourself and always a bit wary of unfair shmups which swamp you with bullets or just seem unfair. This seems nicely balanced, I think I'll give it a shot myself!

I am tempted to give this a trial even though these games kick my arse. All thanks to your shit hot review, nice work waggles!

Amazing review! Bit bias as I'm the developer but it is really well written.
Thanks so much for taking the time to play my little game, means a lot.

Good work Waggly.

Thanks guys.

Flump Studios wrote:Amazing review! Bit bias as I'm the developer but it is really well written.
Thanks so much for taking the time to play my little game, means a lot.

Glad to see you enjoyed it, really nice to have some feedback from the developer. Thanks for taking the time to make the game!

Super review that mate! As a result, i'm gonna give it another go. I wasn't enamoured by the demo initially and gave up pretty quickly I must admit. I shall try it again.

I can see the effort and know how that has gone into the game though!

might be tempted to give this a go!

Nice review mate good to have someone giving us the verdict on these indie games

Hi Flump here again

Just to let you know V1.2 has just gone live.
I've taken you advice and placed a panel at the base of the screen to stop the invisible wall issue.
Also fixed a couple of bugs, made it a little more forgiving and increased the speed of the base ship to give slightly sharper game play.

Thanks again for the review, if anyone has any feedback on V1.2 I'd love to hear it.

Paul

Flump Studios wrote:Hi Flump here again

Just to let you know V1.2 has just gone live.
I've taken you advice and placed a panel at the base of the screen to stop the invisible wall issue.
Also fixed a couple of bugs, made it a little more forgiving and increased the speed of the base ship to give slightly sharper game play.

Thanks again for the review, if anyone has any feedback on V1.2 I'd love to hear it.

Paul

Thanks for the heads up - just booted the game and didn't get an update but will try again tomorrow and post my thoughts.

Great to see continuing support for this game!

Ok, sorry. Looks like I jumped the gun and it took MS longer to post the update than expected.
Anyway...Pester 1.2 is now Live...Honestly!!!!

Great review fella. You've stepped upto the mark nicely with these Look forward to reading more.

Really well written review fella