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You don't slice through space in Galak-Z: The Dimensional. You tumble. It's a controlled kind of madness, really: a precision burst of the thrusters carrying you forward before you then pivot - facing up, down, backwards - to bestow showers of sparking laser fire on whatever most needs to be blown to pieces. Homing missiles send clutches of fizzing contrails spiralling out behind them. Anime meteors explode in fat bursts of gas and debris. The shimmering interior walls of a hollow moon glow purple, then deep organic green and then warm, bubbling orange. For an instant, the carnage veers close to a pool of lava that sizzles beneath you, and in front of you, and even curves high over your head, too. Meanwhile, enemy fighters swarm and multiply in the shadows, ghosting outwards in daisy chains and scattering to dodge or to flank. Then you tumble away again, into the next dust cloud, onto the next battleground. It's amazing what you can get done in five seconds.
Jake Kazdal makes games that get right inside a genre, and then expand that genre's boundaries in unexpected ways. Skulls of the Shogun offered tactical battling that was as sharply honed as the glinting blade of its hero's katana, but it sped things up too, introducing players to a turn-based game that moved at the pace of an arcade classic. With Galak-Z, it's arcade classics themselves that get a reinvention. Kazdal's new space shooter has been created to evoke the kind of coin-op thrills he experienced playing at the greasy cabinets in his dad's pizza parlour when he was a kid, but he also wants to work on a larger scale. Asteroids and Centipede both get a name-checking - but so do Fallout 3, Rogue Legacy, Metroid, and GTA. Space-based dog-fighting in a procedural, flattened-out cosmos. Is this the first open-universe game?
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