Graceful Explosion Machine is a great arcade like bullet hell / shooter that reminds me of Geometry Wars all too much. Graceful Explosion Machine was first released on the Nintendo Switch on April the 6th 2017 and at a later date was ported over to PC and PS4 on August the 8th 2017. This game doesn't have too much to it if you just play through the levels available in the game once. This game shines in its replayability in getting a high score and has more depth than it first seems. Although this title does play differently it features a beautiful colourful art style but sometimes it is hard to keep track of what is going on and especially hard to notice what is happening when looking at screenshots. So with saying that i'm just going to include the launch trailer just below to try and show off some of the gameplay present in this game and just how intense and fast paced things can get
A launch trailer for Graceful Explosion Machine
So far as story goes there is none like most arcade games, your job is to gather up the biggest highscore and show off to your friends as the best gamer (who doesn't love getting high scores anyways?)
Gameplay consists of you spawning into a level with your ship who has access to four different weapons each with their own strengths and weaknesses, the levels consist of a cave usually with a few obstacles for you to fly around, these caves loop and are not very big so if you keep going to the right for about 10 seconds you will reach the end of the map which conveniently just wraps around to what was the leftmost part of the map, not before long after spawning in this world you will start to see exclamation markers pop up and this means some enemies are about to spawn in this area. Like the weapons in this game most enemies behave differently and require different approaches or weapons to be able to kill them properly, it is your job to kill the different kinds of enemies and earn some points per enemy you kill. If you manage to start killing people in quick succession of each other you will start to earn a combo which keeps going up the more you continue the combo. In turn this multiplies your score depending on how long you kept the combo going for and how many people you killed. along with getting points for killing enemies in the game you also get some extra "style" points depending on which weapons you use. The most basic weapon will not get you any style points and the other three do but i'm not 100% sure which weapons give you the most points.
Levels in this game are usually split between 3 phases which are just different waves of enemies and the level getting a bit more harder, along with maybe introducing some new threats the level also adds a few more obstacles in the cave to make it harder to traverse making it harder to keep up combos usually this helps give the levels themselves a bit more variety throughout them and making sure you don't always know what layout to expect.
The Four main weapons in Graceful Explosion Machine are
The Basic Blaster is the most used weapon and just shoots simple bullets out in front of your ship doing a low amount of damage but high fire rate, this weapon doesn't require any power but still cannot be used 24/7 without needing a cooldown so you need to take small breaks from using the blaster to ensure you don't hit the cooldown wait.
The Energy Sword uses a blue energy field to quickly circle around your ship cutting up anyone that may be anywhere in a short range of your ship. This is one of my favourite weapons as i like to get up close and personal and when surrounded use my Energy Sword and clear everyone in a short range around me, This weapon is on the lower side of damage but can easily clear the lowest level enemies and is great at clearing large amount of foes and can hit people multiple times. This weapon doesn't take up too much power and generally if you can kill a few enemies with one hit you've earnt back the energy you have used
The Sniper Beam shoots out a massive beam in front of you slowing down your ship immensely but anything caught in the path of the beam will be obliterated, This weapon is more based at killing single targets at a time but has a much bigger range and reaches off the screen when you shoot. This weapon is quite bad when trying to take on large groups of lower health enemies but anything with a bit more health this bad boy will help solve you of your problems. This weapon is very thirsty when it comes to power and drains it like hell and since it is a weapon that can work from much larger ranges it can be hard to go pick up power crystals from dead enemies before they disappear. That being said this is still my go to weapon on any more tanky enemies
The missiles are a big area clear like the Energy Sword but it has more of a distance to it, not only this but it deals some more damage and auto targets everything for you but this comes at a cost and that's a big power cost, i find this my last resort weapon if i'm getting too closed in on otherwise i stick to the other three weapons as they seem to give more damage to the amount of power used and how many scenarios i've found it useful in myself.
Since this is an Arcade game the main focus in the levels are obtaining the largest high-score possible and compete against other people in online leaderboards. This won't appeal to most but being a massively competitive person on each level i strive to get a great score and find myself restarting levels so many times as i lost my combo or got hit. Due to this competitive nature though i have been able to land myself in the top 500 score wise in most levels (i have no life)
This game has an extremely vibrant and colourful art style most things in the game are made of simple shapes including the enemies which for the most part look all bug like too. I do love the look of this game but with all the colours and explosions going on at times it can be hard to realize what's going on, on the screen due to the amount that is happening.
The soundtrack in this game is quite subtle but i find it extremely catchy and find myself listening to it more and more as i leave my switch on in the background to browse the good old interwebs and mainly Steemit ;)
Graceful Explosion Machine is a must have for any players that love arcade like games where your main goal is to rack up the biggest score and chain together your combos in the hopes of making it high in the leaderboards to show off your gaming skill
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