Upgrade Complete

I've been recently impressed by a rather nifty little shooter from Armor Games named UPGRADE COMPLETE, which has a total of about half an hours play in it. However, the concept behind the game involves the usual upgrade mechanism, but applied to everything in the game. The game loader, titles, menus, progress bars, backgrounds, graphics, all novelty additions but the upgrade process is also key to progressing in the game itself.



Your ship starts out quite humble with a coin collector and two gun turrets. The ship moves left and right, but can angle as it does so, to provide you with an arc of fire. The enemy descends from above and you have to terminate them upon which they relinquish the valuable coin cargo. Collecting this with the center of your ship adds funds useful for upgrades! Completing the wave successfully gives you a bonus to the funds collected. Back to the shop you can then add more equipment spatially (within a defined rectangle around the ship). Equipment includes magnets to attract the coin to your collector, engines to boost ship speed and agility, turrets, lighting arc generators and missile launchers - all of which can be upgraded using coinage to a maximum of level 5. You have a limit on the number of items you can attach to your shipspace, and therefore a lot of the "strategy" involves working out a balance between firepower and coverage, as well as how fast you want the ship to move and whether you want to maximise your coin collecting abilities.

Placing your firing mechanisms across a wide area as possible is good to sweep the enemies up, but having some forward to soften them up, and some below your main ship, to catch stragglers that get by you is also important. A major part of the enjoyment of this casual blast em up is building your ship, and boosting the parts in a particular order to get you past the next wave, collect as money as you can and begin the re-design process as you add more or better equipment to the mix. The ability to go back to the main menu, and upgrade the system graphics and music options really does stack novelty onto enjoyement. When you have finally pushed on through to wave 20/20, there is still one or two things you can tweak up, to open up acheivements and end screens.

9/10 for providing a novel and entertaining bitesize of retro, yet original gaming. I wonder where you go with this sort of idea in a much more complex iteration of the game.

You'll have to spend $2000 to upgrade me to provide a better review, possibly a 10/10.

P.S. Although the 4 levels of graphics are entertaining, the people I've discussed this with have all agreed that graphics option 2 is the best - and once you upgrade theres no going back... although there is an upgradeable option to start from scratch.. thankfully.