Project Root Review

Â

Â

If you played video games back in the 90s, there’s a good chance some of your most memorable childhood moments include playing a shmup. Maybe it was R-Type, maybe it was Raiden – doesn’t matter. The genre these titles belong to had some very distinctive traits that were hard to ignore. We’re talking bullet hell, highly improbable spaceships and ridiculously numerous enemies. It’s no wonder we still see similar games today. One such title is Project Root, the game that tries very hard to do something new and interesting. Since our scores are settled above the review itself, you can guess how that went.

On paper, Project Root is a brilliant experience. It takes everything that’s good about the old shmups and combines it with open levels, ship upgrades and everything cool about modern day gaming. Once the devs scrapped the code together, however, things came out a bit different. Let us begin by rounding up the game’s visual presentation, which might very well be its only redeeming quality. In a sentence – it’s nice. We’re not talking some monstrous HD textures here nor sick post processing, but the game does look serviceable and even pleasing in some situations. Explosions, in particular, use well rendered sprites that indeed are quite useful, since just about everything will explode once your Zonda aircraft starts rummaging around properly. While the overall visual style feels simplistic enough, it’s not bad per se. The levels and enemy units are nicely built and look suitably futuristic. The environments are pretty diverse, too, with the only issue here being the fact that the levels are way too long.

True to its roots (pun totally intended), Project Root offers only a handful of lives per each mission, and I’m sure you know just how easy it is to burn through them in this kind of games. The novelty of this title is that it allows the player to freely roam across the given area and complete objectives as he/she sees fit. Again, this sounds great on paper, but in practice, the system falls short. As you can imagine, it’s fairly difficult to control the aircraft in the full 360 spectrum, instead of just thundering forward and causing chaos on the go. This is the primary source of the game’s difficulty. The enemies will often fire at your Zonda from behind, off screen, and since the camera only shows you your relative vicinity, you’re in for a very frustrating experience. Add the fact that the enemies surprisingly try to evade and counter your movements, as well as the irksome controls, and the game already becomes a questionable investment at best. However, the most prominent issue of all, and the one the devs should have taken care of before shipping the game, is the small matter of the game causing severe dizziness with players. After only a couple of moments of gameplay, I felt the effects of the questionably set up camera view, and I’ve never had issues with any point of view, no matter how strangely off it might have been. I let my friend play the game, same thing. So before dealing with anything else, OPQUAM, do something about this.

As it usually goes, the storyline is implemented purely as an excuse to blow things up, and the characters are as bland as they could possibly get. Hell, they even delve into the strangely-annoying-for-no-reason-at-all territory quite often.

The overall production values of the game do not surpass the levels of an low end Playstation 2-era game. I’ve seen some freeware titles with a much better main menu, and even though this wouldn’t mean anything if the game was good, it does set a precedent that Project Root happily obliges to. Which is sad because there certainly is potential. I mean, most of the game’s issues could be solved with a different camera setting, and how hard could that have possibly been? For reasons unbeknownst to us, most of the game is terrible even though a theoretical patch could fix half of it right away. Of course, I might be wrong, but I can only review what I play and that is what I deducted.

Project Root might be worth a buy at a 50% sale, but as it currently stands, it simply isn’t worth the trouble of adjusting to the strange camera angle and extremely unfair difficulty. I suggest waiting to see if the devs will try and fix what’s wrong with the title, but invest into it at your own risk.

Â

Â