Dubbed as a single player split-screen twin-stick shooter risk’em-up plays about as complicatedly as it sounds. Like any good arcade game, the goal is to earn the highest score possible. The gimmick, however, is your score reverts back to zero if you die so playing until death is not an option; the player has to decide when to hit the eject button. A Duel Hand Disaster: Trackher, or ADHD, is not your typical game by any means.
The game is designed as a single player experience but through the use of two screens. The left side of the screen plays like a Space Invaders clone where enemies drop from the top of the screen and the player shoots upward to destroy them. The ship on this left side does not take damage so the player can ignore it if need be but what happens on the left side of the screen affects what happens on the right side. This right side plays more like your typical twin-stick shooter, think Geometry Wars, where the ship must move between relay points to boost the score. If enemies sneak through on the left side of the screen, it will increase the difficulty on the right side of the screen so both play separately but are still connected. Finally, if the player gets game over from being destroyed on the right side of the screen, the score instantly reverts back to zero and the player walks away empty handed. The all-or-nothing gameplay has tremendous risk/reward.
If you think this sound like a complicated game, you would be totally correct. Not only is the learning curve rather high and obscure, so is the menu system. Instead of just selecting a new game from the first option when the game boots up, the player shifts through a series of menus to activate gameplay. There are even real life videos that play featuring development stories. Not to be confused with poor quality, everything about this game is unconventional down to activating a new game. There isn’t even a controller map so the player is left to experiment with plenty of trial-and-error. However, I can’t help but think this, along with the overly complicated nature of the game as a whole, was developed intentionally to provide a unique experience, love it or hate it.
In time, once the rules of gameplay are understood, there is something special seeing scores swell into the billions with the screen filled with an abundance of action. Getting to this point, however, takes tenacity due to the overly complicated nature of gameplay. If you are interested in playing something you have not played before and are willing to put in the time, A Duel Hand Disaster: Trackher is a title to consider.
Also available on PC (for a lower price, still early access) and coming to PS4 and Xbox One.
SCORE: 7/10
Not Sure Why: Trackher is spelled weird
Also Try: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
Wait For It: the Trackhim sequel
By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com
Twitter: @ZackGaz
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