Tachyon Project
Tachyon Project is an action packed dual-stick shooter driven by a story. Through the story mode you'll progressively unlock all the weapons, secondary weapons and perks available to configure your ship. You'll need them to face the increasingly hard enemies you'll find with over 30 different types (including 4 bosses). In Tachyon Project you take control of Ada, a software program that has taken conscience and that was designed to hack into the most secure servers on Earth. After some rather misterious events, Ada is thrown out of the test server where it was living and out into the Internet, but when she tries to go back there she finds she's unable to. She'll then start a journey to uncover the truth behind what happened to her creators, which she considers her parents. In the process she'll find out that things were a bit more complex than she initially thought.
Steam User 24
Normally twin stick shooters aren't really my thing. I've gotten decently into a few of them (most notably Beat Hazard), but I'm not the sort of person who can top leaderboards, and twin sticks are usually all about efficiently racking up the best possible score. I suppose you could say I'm on friendly terms with the devs though, so when they (full disclosure here) gave me a key for the game to test something for them I decided I'd put the game through its paces and let them and you all know what I thought about it.
The first thing that stuck out to me was how well-designed the enemies are. A lot of twin stick shooters end up feeling the same to me because the enemies are usually few and the strategies to handle them are similar. With this game, however, they constantly throw new enemies at you, some building on old concepts and some introducing radically new approaches. I'm far from an expert on the genre, but I've played my fair share of these games and I've run into some particularly novel enemy behaviors I've never seen combined in quite the same way before. One of the early types that stood out to me was the Bull, a large ship that takes a few seconds to lock on before charging at you in a straight line, exploding if it hits a wall. Depending on the situation you might want to shoot it down, get in close and use the Explosion ability to make shooting it down faster, or just avoid it entirely and let it crash into the wall. Each enemy is usually handled differently, and the way they constantly evolve enemy variety and group up enemies in different combinations keeps your head constantly in the game without leaving a second to get bored.
One of the cooler curveballs the game throws at you is the stealth servers. There's an enemy type that will track your movements so long as you fire, and will go to your last known location when you cease firing. They start you with this one basic element, then start adding enemies that can reveal your position if you get close, or be able to come after you once enough time has passed, similarly to a Bull. Mixing in normal enemy types allows for even more possibilities. Running around while the whole world is coming down on your head, finding an escape and letting all the enemies gather around your last position, then gunning them down as they whirl back on you is incredibly satisfying.
With all that said though, the game's certainly not perfect. For example, in Level 4 you're thrown against a boss that more-or-less requires one specific loadout. I threw my face into its fist a few dozen times before I gave up, quit out, changed my equipment and went through the whole level again. The boss features one to three (they get added as you hurt it) spinning invulnerable rings with holes to shoot through. I went into the stage with the starting loadout, but the regular gun shoots too wide to be useful against the small holes (I switched to the more focused Machine Gun), the ship moves too slowly to get around the boss sometimes (switched both perks to ship speed), and the timing to get a shot through all three barriers by the end is extremely tight (I switched to the Freezing Bomb to hold it in place). With the loadout tailored to the boss I was able to deal with it with much less frustration.
I also found that I don't really like most of the equipment the game has to offer and usually stick with the most basic options. For the main gun especially the standard weapon felt the most effective. The others seem to offer a better risk:reward ratio and higher skill ceiling, but (in my hands at least) they don't feel as potent, nor have the same kind of variety the enemies do. The machine gun and missiles, for example, seem to be practically the same thing.
In a lot of ways I feel Tachyon Project is similar to Super Toy Cars, the dev's previous game. It had some rough edges, but it did what it did extremely well. In the case of Super Toy Cars, they absolutely nailed handling, making the driving experience fun and engaging. Here we see much the same thing: there's a strong focus on the mechanics, in making sure that every single second of gameplay keeps the player hooked. There's a story, but honestly it's entirely skippable (both figuratively and literally). The art is passable, does its job and little beyond that. Music's okay too, though nothing really spectacular. But what really sells this game, and why you should play it, is because it's just so much fun. I've never played a twin stick shooter that felt more active and alive than this one.
Steam User 20
This game deserves more attention! It's like the old geometry wars, really atomic bombastic fast action with upgrades and high difficulties. On a side note: can also be played with keyboard and mouse.
Steam User 15
My Quick Look of Tachyon Project:
Quick Impressions:
Essentially, it's a Geometry Wars-like. The scoring method is inversed. So instead of shooting things to increase your score and picking up their gems to increase your multiplier, you shoot things to increase your multiplier and pick up gems to increase your score.
I kind of prefer the way scoring is handled in vanilla Geometry Wars, but this way is completely valid.
The parts that expand on the Geometry Wars formula is with the ship's configuration. You need to advance in the game to unlock new weapons and augments, but essentially you can create a custom loadout for your ship, which is also pleasantly necessary as the game progresses (instead of just being a thing you can do with no purpose).
For instance, instead of your standard mini-spread gun pattern, you can opt for a more narrow but faster shot, like a machine gun. Or you can go even tighter and with a higher frequency and have a laser.
Vanilla Geometry Wars gives you Bombs, Tachyon Project gives you bombs as well. But they aren't level destroyers, they just do a spread of damage. It doesn't necessarily have to kill your enemies, just injure them. Or you could opt to do one set of bombs and one set of proximity mines, or freezing bombs.
Additionally, you get two augments to complete your loadout. Augments such as fire faster, do more damage per shot, your ship goes faster, etc.
The last thing I want to mention is the timer. The timer has two mechanics attached to it. One is that it's your health. You can gain health/time by defeating enemies. The second is your bombs/secondary weapons use 1 second per use (each secondary weapon has a cooldown, so you can't just spam it forcing yourself to die.)
Bottom line: Tachyon Project is a well done Geometry Wars clone, mechanics-wise. The visuals and sound are not up to par though.
Steam User 1
It looks decent,it can be fun to play,but sometimes there are simply to many colours on the screen and it becomes hard to see. Overall it's not perfect,but it's not a bad game.
Steam User 3
Very under rated game, that I thought was outstanding. The graphics are vivid and nicely done, with entrancing music, paced well for a hectic twin stick. The controls are smooth and responsive as well.
It has an interesting single player story mode, and single/multi player challenge modes. There are 10 mulit-wave stages to complete in story mode, with a boss challenge at the ends of stages.The story mode starts off pretty basic, and not much of a challenge other than making sure your ship doesn't run out of energy before the wave is done, but the challenge becomes quite intense as the story moves along.
Each stage is is split into a number of waves, and if you fail your mission, you can continue from the beginning of the most recent wave instead of having to restart the whole stage. If you quit however. next time playing you can only select to start from the beginning of the highest stage you've unlocked.
There are numerous different enemies that get introduced as you make your way through the story, each with markedly different characteristics. Reaching certain milestones in the game, unlocks additional weapons, modifiers, and specials.
The objective of the game is to complete each wave/goal, without running out of time on the meter in the top center of the screen. It's labelled as time, but as far as game mechanics go, it's really an energy meter. Your ship consumes energy at a gradual rate, and as you collect the little blue energy balls left over from destroyed enemies, it rebuilds your energy.
If you are hit by an enemy, it consumes some of your energy. If you use your special to activate a shield or turret etc., it also consumes some of your energy, so you have to use it strategically to avoid putting your energy at a dangerously low level. If your energy bar ever reaches zero, it's mission failed.
The game had three broken Steam achievements, that were removed by the devs in the last few weeks, so 100% achievement status is now possible.
Steam User 2
It's like Geometry Wars but with clear goals and better sound effects.
Steam User 1
nice little shooter ..those red kamikaze ships are a b though. Anyways I enjoyed it.