A vertical shooter published by Flynn’s Arcade, Viral Reload EX has plenty of unique qualities.
What makes this shooter different from most others? First, there is a larger emphasis on story. Each chapter is capped with cutscenes that depict the story of shrinking to a microscopic size to destroy viruses. Unfortunately, the story is a overly complicated as I had a difficult time following what exactly was happening. It is cool a narrative has been built into a shooter, but it is unfortunate that it doesn’t make much sense.
The other reason that makes this vertical shmup unique comes from the combat and stage progression. Armed only with a default loadout, it is weird playing a shooter without any power-ups, upgrades, or weapon-based unlockables. Having access to stock ordinance was an intentional design choice as it directly determines difficult factor. Make no mistake, Viral Reload is a hard game. So hard, in fact, that its difficulty gets in the way of the fun factor. After many, many attempts, I was finally able to clear the first stage, only to get destroyed on the second. Thankfully, progress is saved so the player doesn’t need to start at the beginning, but it sort of doesn’t matter when you cannot clear the current stage.
Why is Viral Reload so difficult? Since there are no power-ups, it always takes the same amount of hits to destroy any common enemy, in which there are many. Killing anything takes way too many hits in this wave-based stage progression. What does this mean? You have one life, one hit, to clear the current wave of enemies that spawn on screen, all of which spew tons of bullets and take many hits to clear. If you manage to survive wave one’s onslaught, it is onto wave two, and so on. Once several waves have been cleared in progression without dying, the player can save and start the next stage. However, all waves must be cleared while only having three lives, and each death restarts you at the beginning of that wave. In other words, this is a shooter where anything less than total perfection is punished with a harsh game over.
Compensating for the unnecessarily high difficulty, the player is granted a dash ability which is on a short cool down timer. However, the dash can only be performed horizontally, often times dashing through one bullet only to stop on another. While it is imperative to master the dash to survive, it is a double edge sword as it has just as much potential to kill you than it does save you.
The pixel presentation is well done, and doubles down with the overly complicated cutscenes, but like most recent Flynn’s Arcade releases, it is weird, annoying, and cumbersome to require scanning a QR code at the end of your run to post your score on the leaderboard. Why can’t I just press one button to upload and see where I rank? On top of that, you can’t simply view the online leaderboard in the game; it is only viewable when you upload from your smartphone. If the game wasn’t hard and frustrating enough, inconveniencing the player to compete on the leaderboard doesn’t make the experience intuitive. At least the built-in achievements are nice.
Viral Reload EX isn’t a bad game, it is just a really difficult one that gets in the way of itself. Since it is overly difficulty, it has a higher probability of limiting the overall fun factor. After all my attempts, I couldn’t clear the second stage, rage quit, and deleted the game from my Switch’s memory, never to be played again… which is something that usually doesn’t happen with my experience playing Flynn’s Arcade titles.
SCORE: 5/10
By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com
X/Twitter: @ZackGaz
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