Wasteland Angel is a new arcade-style shooter from Meridian4. The player takes on the role of the eponymous hero, riding into the wasteland in her heavily modified vehicle to combat the villains of the wasteland and protect the peaceful towns which still hold out against the terrible post-apocalyptic conditions.
The game play takes the form of a combination between a steered third-person shooter and a defense game. The hero circles the peaceful towns, shooting back at the enemy vehicles as they come in waves. Most of the enemies are simply trying to kill Angel, but some of them drive to the town and start kidnapping the residents. The player has to stop them from loading up the helpless citizenry before they are all taken or killed, being careful not to run over the ones who have successfully escaped the vile slaver clutches.
The cities must be defended.
Throughout the game, the enemies drop various bonus tokens, which Angel can collect for bonus points, weapon upgrades, and life. Between waves, she can send her car to a charging station which allows her to regain life depending on how much time the player was able to leave between waves. This is where the most satisfying part of the game comes in—as the car upgrades its weapons, blasting individual enemies becomes less and less of a challenge.
If she stays alive long enough, Angel can get some pretty badass weapons. Of course, if she dies, the penalty is that she loses all these upgrades. It would have been even cooler if the upgrades were not so linear, so that during each play, the car could get slightly different weapons or be customized for the player’s style, but this was not given consideration.
The enemy cars also leave survivors when they explode, and so serve as a secondary challenge as those survivors either try to run off the map or shoot at Angel’s car from a standstill. Either way, many bonus points can be had by running them down.
Boss levels are townless and somewhat repetitive
Every four levels is a boss fight. There are no towns, but Angel has to destroy a super-sized enemy vehicle to continue—all the while continuing to fend off the smaller enemies. Unfortunately, these boss fights are very long and repetitive, giving us the one dull point in the game. It could just be that I’m not very good at it, or I was missing something, but the boss fights were boring—not in the least because there is still the penalty of losing everything when one dies. It was frustrating, in a not-fun way, to get into a boss level full of weapon upgrades and stocked high with superweapons, only to get splattered almost right off the bat, then having to spend the rest of the fight with the bottom tier weapon.
After the Boss levels, the player is sent to a bonus survival level in which the camera is moved to the front of Angel’s car, giving the same gameplay from a different perspective. The idea is to survive as long as possible, and there are no towns to protect. This was a fun part of the game, and I wanted to be able to choose the first person view for other levels, but this is the only place where it’s implemented.
Angel is a tough lady, not afraid to make an enemy of every low-life in the wasted country.
The narrative of the game is told through comic book-style scenes and lots of great voice acting during the levels themselves. Angel is searching for a friend who owned the really cool car before her, and whom she lost track of when the bombs fell. She’s traveling across the country from Washington to New York, by way of Texas, helping whoever she can along the way.
The game’s controls require a bit of a learning curve, but only because we’ve been spoiled. The game can be played with any combination of keyboard, mouse, and gamepad. The basic controls are like a game of Asteroids. The car turns left and right, accelerates and decelerates, and fires straight ahead. This was just tough in the beginning because most top-down shooters today are controlled differently. When I had the controller plugged in, for example, I was constantly trying to move with the left stick and shoot in many directions with the right stick, but after a few levels, I got used to it, just as one tends to do.
On her travels across 24 levels, she encounters three distinct tribes of wasteland villains, each with four different vehicles and in six different visual locations. There isn’t much difference here however, as each are presents the same three enemy types— just skinned over differently—and given better guns and more life. The AI never seems to change and there is little variation to the game play, though the fun of that game play is not diminished by this. There is no multi-player mode, which is always a little disappointing.
Overall, while the game might not be particularly engaging or compelling in the plot department, it is a fun combination of casual genres, and well worth the price of admission.
Wasteland Angel is available on Steam for Windows for $9.99
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