Deep Space Anomaly

Review

Here you are, flying happily in space with your brand-new spaceship, and the spectacle in front of you is just a marvellous. Suddenly your eyes are dragged to a strange object that appears and disappears in a blink of an eye. Within minutes, hundreds of these objects are flashing in and out of your vision until they materialise into a majestic Alien fleet. Thankfully, you are one of the best space pilots and your spick-and-span vessel has the latest weaponry technology at your disposal. Are ready to fight and to eradicate this Deep Space Anomaly you find yourself in? Good luck, you’ll need it. 

Deep Space Anomaly is top-down space shoot ‘em up developed and self-published by DRM GMZ on the 24^th of June 2019 on Steam.

The goal of the game is to survive 30 waves of Alien spaceships to win the game. The gameplay is very simple but extremely addictive. You are in control of a spaceship which you can move around the map by using the W, A, S, D keys on your keyboard and your mouse to target the enemy’s vessels. I believe you can use the Steam pad controller with this game. Unfortunately, in my case, I couldn’t experience playing with a gamepad as I only own a wireless Xbox One controller, with which is doesn’t seem to be compatible. 

As you start your first playthrough, your spaceship will have a small shield, weapon and health. As you clear each of the waves, you’ll earn money and experience points. The amount of money that you receive at the end of each wave will depend on how many enemy spaceships you destroy, but mostly how many you kill in succession (combo) without being hit by an enemy projectile or running into an enemy or an asteroid. This, my friend, is going to be an extraordinary challenge, let me tell you. And one of the reasons is that this game is super-fast; even with my new pair of glasses, I had trouble getting on top of the action more than once.   

The experience points are basically yellow stars that mostly appear after you destroy an enemy (sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t). You have to travel towards each of these stars to collect them, and that will fill up your vessel level gauge which is located on the bottom of your screen. It is imperative for you to collect as many of these stars as possible, and level up your spaceship so that you can add new weapons and few other things.

Before you start the next wave, you’ll be able to spend your money on your vessel. There are five categories that you can upgrade. The main upgrade has eight different upgrades of its own, while some have a limit (only able 4 to 6 upgrade), and others, such as Additional Health and Armour, can keep being upgraded as long as you have enough coins to spare.   Then you have Early, Medium, Heavy and Ultra-Weapons. You must reach a certain level to able to purchase bigger weapons. On top of that, each of these weapons has sub-categories to upgrade. Keep your combo alive as much as you can to receive a big payout at the end of each wave. 

So far, I managed to survive up to the last wave, but fell short by 10 and 15% on both of my attempts. I swear I could taste victory, but these last 15% were all mighty difficult, especially with this massive boss which looks like a giant green spider with huge legs that smashes into you; boy, that was something!

Nice visuals and a fun techno soundtrack. That’s right; you even have doof doof (French techno slang) music in space. It’s fast, easy to play but hard to master. Overall, the game runs pretty well, but I did have an issue with one of my saves; it just got stuck for some reason. However, the next playthrough was fine with my saving and loading. In terms of controls, you can play with your mouse and keyboard and Steam controller (as mentioned on the game Steam store page) but unfortunately doesn’t work with an Xbox One controller. I believe this game is great value for money.