Huge Enemy: Worldbreakers is a horizontal Shmup in where we take control of an android sent back in time to stop an overwhelming assault from completely destroying Earth. Or so I believe. There is very little story told in the few tidbits of dialogue and they are not translated to English all too perfectly. In any case, this is not the genre to come to for an engaging plot, but to navigate your way through projectiles and responding in kind with some firepower of your own. Our comparably small ship packs more than enough punch to deal with both the hordes of regular foes and titanic bosses.
Starting off, we have a choice of two ships to commandeer. One moves faster while the other deals more damage. Both are perfectly viable options for the entirety of the game, allowing you to choose the one that suits your playstyle best. One of this title’s most unique aspects is the ability to briefly fly into the background to avoid any hazards or obstacles, so even using the slower ship doesn’t necessarily decrease your chances to get out of a fight unscathed. It is quite a forgiving game, allowing you to take up to eight direct hits before you are destroyed and sent back to the start of a level.
As forgiving as it is, it does feature some RPG portions to it that doesn’t make it the worst idea to start on Easy, even for veteran shmup players. You see, in order to power up your weapons, you will need some cash gained from defeating enemies and managing to survive that entire stage. Your odds are not all too great jumping straight into the Hard difficulty with the peashooters that are your first two guns. By that same coin, leveling them up too much can make even that mode be a surprisingly easy affair, and there is no way to revert back once you upgrade, nor are there separate save slots to start again from scratch. It has a bit of a balance issue, sadly.
Moving on, your first two weapons of a total of four are the heavy hitting Fusion gun and the Double widow. Ideally, swapping between these are key as one is well suited to taking down larger enemies, while the other is better used to mow down weaker foes that attempt to overwhelm with numbers. I say ideally because starting off the game you will do far better simply sticking to whatever weapon it is you are currently investing your cash into upgrading. It isn’t until you have them all decently upgraded that the intended mechanic to swap between them becomes more viable, at which point you are likely quite overpowered already.
Quite the negative way to begin this review, but I feel that the RPG side of this title did it more harm than good. However, with its most glaring fault out of the way, I can focus on the good. True to the over top image you’d get of a game called ‘Huge Enemy: Worldbreakers’, this title is action-packed and pits you against absurd firepower that easily outmatches even your own. The bosses are the real highlight in where you’ll desperately pelt away at their screen spanning life-bars as you try to avoid their deadly attacks. Explosions, projectiles, lasers, and many more things that are hazardous to your health will be thrown at you at any one time from these hulking giants.
The thing with the bosses is that you won’t even fight a large portion of them using your four regular guns, instead you switch to an auto-firing barrage of orange projectiles only used for boss fights. This unique weapon is not affected by upgrading or any other RPG system, making these sections of the game by far the most balanced. Even fighting a boss where you can use your regular weapons, your overall damage will still barely chip away at them, unlike the regular sections where you can mostly stay in place and easily obliterate all the regular foes. Some of them are so heavily armored that you can’t even damage them, and must instead simply try to survive for a couple of minutes. It’s just a great deal of fun dealing with these titanic war-machines.
Another thing that sets Worldbreakers apart is the interesting Reshield feature. It essentially allows you to attach a green beam onto a boss or an allied ship as to leech off their health and restore your own. This becomes invaluable on the Hard difficulty as there is no frame invincibility during these battles, so one wrong move can rapidly have many health pips disappear as you are struck with multiple projectiles. It becomes a struggle of whether you want to risk further damaging the boss when you have an opening or seizing your attack to restore some of your health.
Funnily enough, you are always taken to the shop before a boss fight in where you can buy some health for a great amount of money. Not to beat this dead horse again, but the entire shop/upgrade system does not work well. It is pointless since you can easily restore health via the reshield. The only practical things in these screens come in the form of Paybacks and Megaweapons, which are free. Paybacks are activated whenever you take enemy damage and come in two forms. The first is a defensive one in where you’ll receive a temporary shield to allow you to catch your breath, with the second being an offensive ability that very briefly allows you to ram into enemy ships without damaging yourself as well. All paybacks are nonfunctional during boss fights on Hard however.
Megaweapons are exactly what they sound like, a huge special attack to brutalize anything unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end. They come in three varying forms of large death-dealing energy blasts, and you will be invulnerable while they are firing. That makes them very useful even when the bosses can’t be hit with regular weapons, as you can activate them to temporarily shrug off their attacks in a bad situation. In total, there are 11 levels to make your way through and 14 bosses to face. The way that works is that you may defeat one boss only to be completely surprised when another shows up immediately afterward to get you while you are weak. If it isn’t obvious by the sheer amount of times I’ve used the word ‘boss’ at this point, they are really quite brilliant and the reason I keep coming back to play this.
That’s not to say that the regular stages are bad. They are a ton of fun at first as you desperately fire into a massive horde of enemies zooming towards you, rotating your guns to shoot backwards, and keep yourself from turning the odds with a megaweapon as you may need it later on. It is just that at a certain point, your firepower gets so great that it becomes more akin to a bunch of moths flying into a flamethrower, rather than you desperately trying to manage a chaotic situation. You barely have to do anything as your projectiles make short work of everything. Making the Hard difficulty more challenging or adding a new higher difficulty to make regular encounters feel as dangerous as they did before you maxed out your ship would go a long way.
The developers seem to be continually taking feedback and improving this title. Many a thing has changed over the course of trying to review this. Significant portions of it have now changed like a now extinct targeting reticle. It is not early access, yet this review may be quickly outdated and inaccurate in the near future. One of the most significant changes is in its price that dropped it from thirty US dollars to ten at the same time its second large update dropped. That alone significantly changes my hesitance in recommending this title. At that price point, it becomes far easier to overlook the flaws and enjoy it for what it is. Huge Enemy Worldbreakers isn’t without its downsides, mostly in balance, but it is a thrilling shmup that is well worth keeping an eye on.
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