Aster is an adult-oriented reimagining of the iconic arcade game Asteroids. Instead of shooting for a high score, we are tasked with surviving all of the 38 stages on offer to take down the boss of the alien menace. There isn’t much of a story here, it focuses purely on the gameplay and throws us into the action nearly immediately. Before then, we are given a choice of which of the four space vessels to commandeer. Each possesses their own stats and there is no going back to choose another later down the line. You can upgrade any stat you desire later on, so ships are more of a specialized starter build than a way to lock you into any particular playstyle.
There are four stats overall. HP dictates how much damage you can take before your ship is blown to smithereens. Attack is how powerful your bullets are. Range will allow your shots to last longer in the coldness of space before they fizzle out, quite handy for flooding the battlefield in projectiles. Finally, you have Size. Upgrading this simply makes your projectiles larger. It is very handy if you are having trouble landing shots with the tiny pellets your weapons let out. All of them are useful, so whether you choose to spend all your cash in a single stat or be a jack of all trades is equally valid, and this does encourage replaying the game since you can’t buy everything.
Starting off our adventure, we are faced with nothing more than asteroids. It is a laid-back introduction, but one that will blow up in your face if you start shooting wildly. Sure you have infinite ammo, yet blasting apart an asteroid creates even smaller pieces of debris from it. You can easily get overwhelmed and battered if you don’t strategize how to blast them apart. Movement is much the same as the arcade game it is inspired by. You have a thruster to launch you in the direction you are facing and momentum carries over, causing you to go faster the longer it is activated, or continue floating around in a general direction when it is off.
The controls feel a bit looser than the arcade game Asteroids. It is more difficult to be precise or pull off impressive feats of navigation. I felt that it lacked the weight that Asteroids had, causing it to feel floaty. If an object smacks into you, your ship acts like a pinball as it bounces around the place. It’s not terrible to control by any means, yet it is certainly something that needed mentioning. You need to clear every enemy or asteroid debris before being allowed to continue to the next stage. Each foe or hazard destroyed grants you currency which you can then use to upgrade your ship, buy a secondary weapon, or simply restore your health and shields. There is a fixed amount of currency you can get on your journey, so spend it wisely.
Every few stages a space shop will appear, which is certainly a sight for sore eyes as this game does not restore your health or shields. The only way to repair your damage is via cold, hard cash, making it quite a costly affair for those that play carelessly. You won’t be fighting lifeless hunks of rocks for long. Soon enough, the aliens will appear, either out of the asteroids when you crack them or elsewhere. To further add to your problems, you have human pirate enemies too. If it moves, shoot it. And if it doesn’t, still shoot it. Aster will get progressively more difficult and you want to be well-equipped for when the time comes where any mistake could quickly spell your death.
You have an infinite amount of lives, yet you will be thrust back to the last checkpoint. These show up every couple of levels and also double as a save function, so you can stop there and pick the game up later. Being returned to a checkpoint via death will cost you some currency and you do show up on the verge of death, not how you originally were when you activated it. This will cause you to spend even more cash on fixing yourself back up unless you want to brave it out there with a single pip of health. That is actually doable, but quite risky since you do not know when the next checkpoint or shop will appear.
Bumping into hazards or taking a direct blow from a projectile will drain your shield meter. Once that is gone, every hit will be directly to your health. Being boarded by either pirates or aliens, on the other hand, will always cost you health. Do not let an enemy make a B-line straight towards you if you see them attempting to do so. Letting it go on for too long without shooting them off will get your ship overrun and your character sexually violated. It can be easy to forget it is a hentai title as that is the only time anything remotely lewd will occur. Funnily enough, the gameplay is so good you’ll likely resist with all your might to keep that from happening, even if you did originally buy it for the pixel animation sex.
This game is intense and constantly introducing new enemies or hazards to contend with. It can be things like a giant metallic hand floating around, which is both indestructible and quite dangerous if you crash into such an object, or simply the gravitational pull of Earth. I’m not a fan of that gravitational pull gimmick. It would have been cool once or twice, yet it is used too much. This makes the levels feel kind of disjointed as you keep switching from the cold emptiness of space, then suddenly to the same identifiable location. Thankfully, it is still not all that common. The controls are not tight enough to make the constant act of being pulled into the bottom of the screen fun. Especially when they start introducing hazards or the aliens that pull you around, further messing with your movement.
There are four secondary weapons to purchase and are used by holding down the attack button. These can also be found randomly during the beginning of the game as to let you know how they function. Each are quite different from one another. You’ll have a “Sword”, which is just a stabilized short beam of energy to engage in very close encounters with. The Laser that fires a sustained beam the direction you are pointing. A Fire Bomb that sends out an explosive that takes a while to detonate, but is very destructive. And last but not least, we have the Charge. It gathers up all of your projectile energy into one big, devastating shot. All of them are viable options and can be destroyed straight off your ship by bumping into a hazard too violently.
You may have noticed the metal blocks or pillars in the pictures. Those are in fact not a hazard. You can bump into them as much as you want. I do not know why, but I’m not complaining. Defeating all 38 stages took me around an hour. It is a short game, yet one I immediately had a desire to replay. That is quite the rarity these days for me. I had a ton of fun as I held my breath and turned off my thrusters to zoom around the stage while shooting all around me. My eyes were glued to the screen at all times and the pacing of it was superb, minus the gravitational Earth levels. You hardly feel it scaling up the difficulty and before you know it, you are facing off against a good amount of foes with a grin on your face.
Defeating the last boss will unlock all of the H content. There are ten sexual pixel animations overall, all of them of a good, yet short quality. I wouldn’t get it solely for the lewd aspects though. Getting to the point where you can see them all will require you to get good at the title and it is a moderate challenge. If you want a good Asteroid like game, however, forget about whether you like hentai or not. That is optional for the most part. This likewise contains great music, graphics, and gameplay that captures the spirit of the Arcade classics while introducing modern RPG elements. Aster is more than well-made and fun enough to stand on its own merits. For the seven dollars they are asking for it, it is more than worth it. It also has a demo available so you can try for yourself and see if it suits your fancy before you make that decision.
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