Shred Nebula Impressions
September 5th, 2008
The summer season of Xbox Live Arcade which delivered exceptional high quality releases in Geometry Wars 2, Galaga Legions, Braid, and of course Castle Crashers has unfortunately come to an end and it seems like we’re once more back into the familiar “hit-and-miss” territory that’s so representative of the service.
Shred Nebula is a top down space shooter, similar in some respects to Asteroids, in which you control a single ship that rotates on a central axis, can fire and thrust in the direction you’re facing and whereby the ship’s inertia has a significant effect on movement and controls. However, unlike the simple joys of Asteroids this is a far more complex beast to handle.
Taking command of the prototype ship: the RIP Rocket, your task is to explore the nearby solar systems trying to locate the lost Algron Exploration Fleet which failed to return from an expansive exploratory charting mission 12 years hence. Along the way you will encounter both hazards and hostile aliens all of which are detrimental to the integrity of your ship.
Controlling the RIP Rocket isn’t the easiest thing in the universe for something that is supposedly “state-of-the-art” and requires some dextrous finger work to keep the ship pointing in the right direction whilst seeing off incoming alien attacks and avoiding hazards. If you only had to worry about direction, thrust, and a primary weapon then it wouldn’t be so bad; but you also need to think about using your temporary active shields (which can, if required, also reflect incoming projectiles), using reverse thrust, firing special weapons, controlling the ship’s 360 turret, and scanning objects. It’s all rather overwhelming and, in my opinion, far too complex for a game of this nature. The net result is that you feel more out-of-control than actually in-control and frequently end up flying into objects or hazardous nebulae until you’ve mastered the controls.
To further compound issues with the controls the enemy AI seems to be almost exclusively kamikaze-like in nature. Enemy ships make an immediate beeline for the player upon appearing on screen, and thus this necessitates the need to master the art of flying backwards in order to keep a rain of fire on your target while trying to avoid the inevitable collision.
The core principles of the game work well, but I believe Shred Nebula suffers from two or three ideas too many that don’t really enhance the game and could have been dropped in order to simplify matters. For example the active shield and its ability to reflect incoming fire doesn’t feel like it’s really worth the hassle of timing the activation correctly, and using the right joystick to control the turret just to scan objects which can take four seconds to complete seems superfluous. Visually however the game doesn’t disappoint with some stunning looking backdrops, great explosions, and it all runs extremely smoothly with no hint of slowdown.
It could be that I’m now expecting too much from games published on Xbox Live Arcade, after all the bar has certainly been raised over the past few weeks, but Shred Nebula doesn’t quite reach the same lofty heights as the aforementioned games at the top of this post. It is unfortunate that the game has been released after such a golden period of arcade titles because after reading up about the developers, CrunchTime Games Inc – a small independent studio of just eight full time team members - then I really do want them to succeed in an industry that is increasingly dominated by huge development teams, some of which still deliver a lot of dross. In fact I applaud CrunchTime Games Inc for there efforts and it’s amazing to see what they’ve produced, but at the end of the day this game just isn’t for me.
Shred Nebula is available for 800 Microsoft Points (GBP 6.80 / EUR 9.30 / USD 10.00).
