Galak-Z: The Dimensional review

[Administrator]

Don't be fooled by the bragging, wisecracking pilot, the soaring Saturday morning cartoon soundtrack, or that evocative scarlet spaceship - the kind that has flown through countless boyhood dreams, turning aliens to green mush and asteroids to fine space dust. All of that can be found in 17-Bit's anime-inspired heroic space shoot-'em-up, Galak-Z: The Dimensional. But beneath the paint, this is, in Christian Donlan's enviable phrase, a catastrophe game. In other words, it comes to life not when you're laying waste a squadron of Imperial fighters to the sound of a Joe Satriani-esque guitar solo, but when you're trembling in the nook of some space cavern, health bar blinking on a sliver, wondering how the hell you're going to make it back to the Axelios mothership in one piece.
Galak-Z might share a general aesthetic with Gradius and the other classic arcade space shoot-'em-ups, but structurally and philosophically its closest relative is Spelunky, with all of the challenge that association implies. As in Derek Yu's modern masterpiece, much of your time is spent burrowing into rock (in this case, vast asteroids, whose interiors are a cosy warren of corridors and chambers) in search of treasure. No chests overflowing with gold or jewels here. Rather, pieces of idle space junk, either harvested from downed enemies or caches, which can be spent on buying upgrades for your own craft. While each stage has a goal (usually to destroy an Imperial satellite, or to move an object from one place to another), your primary task is hunter-gathering. You collect the trash. You hunt the upgrades.
Galak-Z is a roguelike: the arrangement of each stage's items, enemies and asteroids changes with every attempt. As such, if you wish to triumph, you must learn not maps and layouts but patterns and principles. Your ship is nimble. It can fly in all directions, boost away from (or into) danger, strafe, fire lock-on missiles and even leap over enemy bullets with a well-timed button press. It can be customised with different types of shot - wide-angled or tight-angled, freezing or burning - and once you clear the first clutch of stages, it becomes vastly more flexible in ways that it would be a shame to spoil. The trick is learning to match the response to the situation.
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