Between Shank, Super Meat Boy and Gish (which I don't have a review of to link to... yet) I have been playing a whole lot of games based off of old school styles with modern twists. ARES is no exception to this trend. Imagine, if you will, the love child of Contra and Megaman X, and in addition to being one of the most baffling and/or awesome pornographic mental images you could conjure, it's probably a good facsimile of about what you can expect from ARES.
The action of the game takes place in the late 21st century. Due to our massive industrialized ways, Earth is too polluted and humanity faces extinction. A process is devised called deep space reprocessing, that can recycle matter into organic forms over time, and a station that performs this task was launched in to Earth orbit. Some time later, this station encounters a crystalline structure that emits a fluorescent gas (called zytron) that kills the ship's systems before turning every piece of electronic equipment sentient and hostile. You play as ARES, the first robot developed by humanity that is immune to zytron gas. It is your job to clear out the station, rescue the human hostages, and stop this apparent revolt of the machines.
With as many explosions as your ass can muster.
Before I discuss the game proper, I may as well point out that this game is short. Very short. Easily beaten in a not very focused afternoon short (at least on Normal difficulty). This isn't the worst sin a game can commit, but I do feel that it impacts the value, as $10 does feel a little bit steep for the pure content of the game. Still, this is a complaint with almost every indie game I review and I'm starting to feel like it's simply the norm in this industry with smaller developers and I should stop pointing it out. But given that most of us often need to spend money on more important things like food or prostitutes, I think the issue still bears mentioning.
But anyway: ARES. Like I said, picture something like Megaman X with the weapon mobility and jumping of the 16 bit era Contra games. You traverse fairly linear maps blowing up robots, with a couple of new types introduced each level. Enemies drop spare parts of 3 different kinds, which you can collect to upgrade your weapons, or manufacture grenades and health kits. There are also hidden collectibles that lie off the beaten path and provide fun extra challenges to hunt down, as well as occasionally a means of augmenting some of ARES' abilities. Granted, some of these upgrade trees feel superfluous, as I can't for the life of me figure out why you would use anything other than the upgraded submachine gun with an absurdly high rate of fire, but the upgrade options may simply reflect a choice in play style. Though again, I feel like most gamers' style when they have unlimited ammo is "shoot as many bullets into as many things as you can until they are dead", so again, SMG seems to be the clear winner.
Pictured: useless, ineffective bullshit.
My complaints with the weapon upgrades, however, are based more on a feeling that they are superfluous, but this is different from feeling like they actively detract from the game, which they do not. On the whole, this game is really a lot of fun. It is playable with a gamepad OR mouse and keyboard, and in each case the result is really tight. Allowing the player to pick a direction and fire at maximum rate with the right analog stick was an inspired choice, allowing for fantastic precision in the frequent firefights. You also have the option, however, of holding down a button to fire, which makes shooting during more concentration-intensive platforming sections easy to get the hang of as well. I do have a small beef with the jumping mechanics, which feel a little heavy, as well as the dashing/grenade jumping mechanic, which is incredibly imprecise and got me killed a lot, but oftentimes, you don't have to make particularly complicated use of these abilities, and so the deaths tended to be spaced out enough that I didn't have to replay areas more than a couple of times until the very end. Lastly, the boss fights in each level are a whole lot of fun to figure out, even if they are easily the most challenging part of this game (largely due to the aforementioned heavy jumping controls). They tend to be grand, screen encompassing affairs, once again akin to the bosses from Contra 3 or Contra Hard Corps.
Yeah, this is the boss of the first level.
So consider this my unequivocal recommendation of ARES: Extinction Agenda to anyone looking for a good side scrolling action platformer for $10. It is short, but when you look back on the first playthrough, you will probably remember what a blast you just had, and dive back in to tackle hard mode immediately like I did. Hey, it's cheaper than popcorn and a movie ticket, and that also only lasts 2 hours.
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