Score: 7
"Short, sweet, and not your regualar shooter"
date: March 13, 2008
I remember playing the 'beta' version of Battlemachy and thought that the game was not bad but not perfect either. urbansquall has given you a game where your movements are severely limited (usually to the perimeter of a circle or simply a straight line), each level is only one screen (i.e. no scrolling) and you 'pilot' a dragon. The nice things about it are that it looks good, it's got an anime look to it much like the 16-bit Final Fantasy games. The character portraits are also well drawn, and the animations, while limited are decent additions to the game. You can upgrade four attributes (health, shot frequency, projectile speed and movement speed) and you have a choice of four different weapons, which I thought was nice. Each weapon plays different, so it adds a good variation to the gameplay. The levels themselves are designed well, but they're not very long. Difficulty is medium-to-low, up until the fourth level where it's cranked up HARD to almost impossible. Control-wise, I had a few issues. Especially in the fourth level, I found it hard to steer & shoot at the same time while trying to dodge a barrage of fire. You move pretty slow even with one upgrade to movement, so dodging fire is tricky, and the pause feature (where the game pauses if you place your cursor outside the flash window) is inconvenient and annoying. The story in the game is not paced well, but this IS a flash game, so you have to take that into account. The dialogue is alright, but don't expect Shakespearian drama here. Overall, a pretty decent effort, but it could use some patching up.