17-Bit’s space shooter is all the better for going rogue
When we previously tuned in to Galak-Z, 17-Bit CEO and creative director Jake Kazdal described his retro-themed space shooter as the modern antidote to endless twin-stick blasting and a thousand circles of bullet hell. Not that you’d know it just by looking. With its cel-shading, pause screen drenched in VHS stutter and CRT fringing, teleplay credits before every mission, and asteroids that break into chunks at the merest brush of a hot-pink laser bolt, Galak-Z continues to lean heavily on the visual language of ’80s Saturday morning anime and ’70s arcade cabs. After over a year spent retrofitting Roguelike elements into the game, nothing about Kazdal’s early mission statement has changed either, yet everything is subtly different.
Where once freeform levels were the intermissions between defined maps, now they are the norm. Layered on top are simple objectives, delivered between these so-called episodes onboard your stricken mothership, the Axelios. Whatever task is at hand, it’s down to Battle-Of-The-Planets-styled greenhorn and last surviving fighter pilot A-Tak to make it happen. And while the mission templates in Galak-Z’s increasingly tough seasons soon become familiar, the procedural planetoids and enemy placements lend unpredictability to every run.
But even navigating the tutorial requires a remapping of instinct. In the void, there’s no air resistance to slow A-Tak’s snub-nosed fighter, so you’ll barrel onwards until you hit something or correct your course. The craft carries plenty of momentum too; pivoting your prow with the left stick and firing your thrusters – the left and right triggers kicking in your forward and aft jets respectively – tends to push you around in boozy arcs. Still, while the combination of frictionless space and that sense of heft leads to rather ebullient handling, it’s tight enough to be predictable. After a few test flights you’ll be flicking your tail out for careening drifts around corners, flipping 180 degrees and flying backwards as you continue to blast away at pursuers, or hitting the afterburner at just the right moment to dodge a barrage of laser fire, although the game is generous enough that knocking into walls and space rocks does nothing except slow you down.
You’ll have more than enough to focus on in combat. Powered by Cyntient AI, the forces arrayed against you – bugs, pirates, Imperials – need to be outwitted and outmanoeuvred, not just outgunned. Bugs at least tend to be single-minded eating machines, but enemy craft display all kinds of behaviours. Trouble an Imperial drone and it will rush off for help, drawing tank-like battlecrusiers to your location. Some enemies back off when their shields fail, and most will hunt you down if you try to do the same, pushing the attack. Best of all is the chaos when the factions interact, something you can intentionally create by kiting one enemy type into another, assuming you have the chutzpah and the cockpit skills to not get vaporised in the crossfire. In extreme circumstances, you may want to break out your limited supply of missiles, each level of lock adding to a cloud of homing rockets that can hammer all but the largest threats into submission. Acquiring locks still requires precision, but it’s as close as Galak-Z comes to handing you a free pass.
In the face of such forces, a stealthy approach is often best, a thin blue circle readably denoting your engine noise. If you can time your thruster pulses just right, you can drift into an ideal position to open with a salvo of fire that strips away shields and ends battles quickly. And you’ll want to do that, or even sneak past patrols completely, because what Galak-Z has most obviously cribbed from modern Roguelikes is persistent damage. As with everything here, it’s smart: shields can absorb a few points of damage and are replenished after a short delay, but hull integrity, once lost, is hard to repair. It turns almost every battle into a high-stakes tussle, a scrabble to shut down opponents quickly.
We say ‘almost’ because scattered about the maps – and available to purchase between missions in limited numbers – are randomly selected ship upgrades that can eventually make fights with the basic enemies very short indeed. By the time your single laser bolts have become a tridentate spray of icy double fire, you’ll scoff at light fighters. Upgrades are about more than firepower, though, granting boosts to loot-harvesting, cutting engine noise, and on rare occasions even permanently boosting your durability. But as you scale up A-Tak’s power, so too do the threats and the chaos stack, ensuring you can’t afford to ever be fully at ease.
We said a little over 15 months ago that Galak-Z felt feature complete, and it did. The moreish handling, the just-so tension of acquiring a missile lock, and the AI-driven fleets were all roughed in. But couched in the mores of the Roguelike genre, those systems find a tension and variety that promise to turn clever ideas into an enduring pursuit. It may look a lot like the past, but be prepared for 17-Bit’s latest to consume many of your hours in the not-too-distant future.