The lightly touched on story revolves around a shackled Mars revolting from its rulers, Earth. Earth deploys you to crush this rebellion, outfitting you in one of two ships, Mosquito 1 or Mosquito 2. The former is equipped with a fairly wide spread shot, the latter with straight forward gunfire and superior speed. also come strapped with a short-ranged, but very powerful, piercing cannon and the absorption barrier mosquito. When your gauge is full, using this mosquito technique will suck in all enemy fire and, with a bit of deft aiming, hurl them back toward those dirty rebels. You may also drain the gauge entirely to unleash the ruthless gravity hole bomb.
Takumi obviously likes horrible names, but before you're even able to wrap your head around the nerdy 'absorption barrier mosquito,' your ship will probably have exploded. There are absolutely no walls or meteor rocks to maneuver around in Mars Matrix, nor will touching enemies kill you, or even strip you of any weapons. Instead, you face off against bullets. Lots of bullets. Millions of bullets. Lines of bullets, waves of bullets, nets of **********ing bullets. The only time your TV screen won't be soaked with bright blue or neon pink enemy fire is when your score is being tallied up at the end of each level - and you'll only ever see that with a little miracle work.
Okay, so that's not entirely accurate - the first two levels only seem to spit a couple hundred thousand bullets in your face. But Mars Matrix does go ape**** on you, sodomizing you with bright-colored dots from beginning to end. (Your end.) The game walks that line of impossibility, and yet, it's not impossible. Hell, Takumi even includes strategy videos for you to unlock that display the talents of some super-nerd beating all but the last stage without dying once. It's absolutely nuts.
Most of this seems so overwhelming because the absorption barrier mosquito is much harder to use effectively than you'd think. You have to know when to use it, how much of the gauge to drain and to whom you'll make eat their own bullets. To call this demanding would be a serious understatement. But the download free games are properly set up for you to take out a few tanks with your basic shot here, unleash the piercing cannon on a battle cruiser there and pull in gunfire when their dozens of replacements arrive. Your mosquito gauge fills up fairly quickly, too, so you're never really caught with your crap hanging out in wind. You're also given much leeway with your tiny hitbox, and though the later levels churn out more than enough bullets to frighten all the insurgents and soldiers currently in Iraq, you're able to level up your standard shot to respectable power by collecting enough of the gold cubes each destroyed enemy generates.
April 2010