Star of Providence mixes retro and modern in all good manners

Providence star It’s like a retro game I would have liked when I was a child. But the Roguelike Bullet Hell Shooter is also a modern double stick shooter, and the fusion of the two eras results in a fun, fast and difficult experience.

In StarYou control a ship and explore dungeons generated at random. As you sail in the room by room – similar to an old school Legend of Zelda Game – You will collect powerful weapons to fight the many enemies you will fall on your dungeon.

Weapons are a pleasure, filling your ball and lasers screen. Sometimes you will get nice effects such as the possibility for your balls to pass through one side of the screen and appear on the other. But enemies can also spit huge amounts of bullets, which means that many pieces turn into chaos when you wear through the attack models to align a perfect blow. The narrow appearance ratio of the game means that the rooms also feel quite small (although I appreciate how it adds to the retro atmosphere).

Star The orders are tight, so he always has the impression of being able to put on the needle to escape the danger. A useful dashboard can bring you out of difficult points. And you can deploy bombs to erase the balls from a room, but they can take a while to recharge.

While you explore the dungeons, you will have to make a lot of typical Roguelike-Y choice, like what to buy in a store or the upgrades to choose. The most important choice is undoubtedly the weapons you take along the way: they are much more powerful than your basic weapon, but they also have a limited amount of ammunition. But I found that it was a fun strategy. Do I have to buy a weapon just when I come to a store but may lack ammunition before I really need it? Or should I try to survive a floor without him and buy the weapon when I am about to take the boss of the Word?

Speaking of patterns: they are great. They are generally giant, taking a good part of the square screen, and they spit balls in all kinds of unpredictable and bitten patterns. I am a big fan of Huge green skeleton with horns.

Maybe my favorite thing about Star Is everything fast. The rooms generally take only a few seconds to free themselves, which means that you can cross a whole dungeon floor in a few minutes. The game card allows you to teleport to instantly in rooms that you have previously went while you explore a floor. Even boss fights generally only take a minute or two. And when you want to start a new race, all you have to do is go through a door to your base.

There is a constant feeling of the momentum before I think more games should imitate. Maybe that’s where Star It looks most like the old -fashioned games that inspire them: jumping into the action is almost as simple as adding another quarter to an arcade machine.

_{Providence star is available now on Nintendo Switch and PC.}