Review by Raphie on 12 Feb 2009 (Rating: 3)
It's definatley not the best shoot-em-up but it's a good one considering its cheap price at the time. The game itself is playable but rather slow at times and it's not-so-good colours spoil it from getting a 4. Still if you're a fan of the shoot-em-up genre you may want to give this a go.
I was certainly pleased to have purchased this game, it was worth its price.
Octan by Silverbird? Cheap and cheerful I suppose!
Octan is a vertically scrolling shoot em' up, which actually isn't that bad. It does kind of plod along at a moderate pace, but that's fine, the enemy sprites look OK, and the graphics are quite well defined in general.
I like the way you have lasers, and missiles. The lasers are for shooting your moving targets, and the missiles are for destroying ground based gun turrets.
BUT...
The graphical choices in places are pretty shall we say out there. The basic floor when you're not flying over solid ground is this weird abstract wireframe type thing, which looks OK in theory, but in practice coupled with the green on black monochrome colour choice, it's pretty bad. It pretty much makes your eyes play Pontoon, meaning one sticks, and the other one twists.
I feel like having some breaks in the wireframe, or just patches of it would have been way more acceptable, or even though it's a bit generic and boring plain black background, or even just a starfield.
The game also suffers from single shot syndrome, by which I mean you can only fire once, and can't fire again until it either hits something, or exits the screen. This is one thing I really, really hate in all shooters that have it.
Other odd flaws follow, the enemies bullets all follow you, weither they come from the grounded gun turrets, or the moving enemies. I like the idea of heat seekers, but this is totally unfair when there's a load of enemies onscreen, you've only got one shot at a time, you're desperately hammering the fire button, and an enemy right in front of you shoots, you move to avoid it and it follows you giving you no time or even any chance of getting away.
Checkpoints are few and far between, but at least the game does have checkpoints in places, having to start all the way from the beginning every time you die is a big no-no in my books, especially with shoot em' ups.
Back to the good stuff though flaws aside it's not a terrible game to play once you get used to it, and for just under 3 quid it was a reasonable effort. I will say I'd have preferred to pay £1.99 for it, but I suppose it really was worth the £2.99 asking price, and with 8 levels, and bosses, you're getting your money's worth. I've played much worse games for much larger price tags.
Still it's only getting an average score, for all it's not terrible, it's definitely not groundbreaking stuff either, and some of the problems I mentioned above are gamebreakers for me I'm afraid. I enjoy the game to a certain extent but I don't like eyestrain or headaches as I'm sure nobody else does either. These problems stop this semi-decent game from getting the 4 it could have deserved with just a little more spit n' polish.
