Containing the same visual style and gameplay of EastAsiaSoft’s ThunderKid series, Escape from Terror City is a 3rd person gallery shooter. The purposely designed low-poly look provides a retro feel.
This low-cost digital download doesn’t just look like a old game, it plays like one too specifically when it comes to the difficulty. The first stage might be a breeze, but the challenge increases quickly. Often the player must navigate gauntlets of attrition, fighting swarms of enemies at once. Even though most pink bullets are easy to see and move relatively slowly, there isn’t much room for error when the screen gets flooded with them. The problem is the difficulty seems artificially inflated since each enemy, especially bosses, take entirely too many hits.
There are a bunch of small errors and inconsistency too. For example, this a 3rd person shooter with no option to invert the camera, making the game nearly unplayable for me. If you watch my stream embedded in this article, you’ll see there are the really awkward screen transitions when the camera bends 90 degrees. The controls are also slippery, making it easy to accidentally fall off platforms. The sound effects are ear piecing and there were times when the rumble in my controller would not deactivate once activated. It also would have been nice if there were unlockables or upgrades to make gameplay a little more interesting and varied.
So yeah, there are some obvious flaws, but it isn’t all bad. It is a pretty mindless action game but it does contain some big point Achievements, like most EastAsiaSoft games do, and the cost is so low it can fit into any budget. Other than a hard mode, there is no replay value, but this isn’t a bad way to spend an hour to boost that Gamerscore.
SCORE: 4/10
Also Play: Breakneck City
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Wait For It: the next Gears title
By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com
Twitter: @ZackGaz
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