Fatal Stormer

Review

Are you a fan of side scroller shoot’em up games? Are you looking for a game that can provide several types of challenging levels? If yes, you might need to have a good look at this interesting 3D arcade style of game called, Fatal Stormer!

Fatal Stormer is an arcade side scrolling game where you take control of a vessel through 4 worlds and 24 missions.

The game provides 3 levels of difficulty (casual, normal and hard). If you are not familiar with this genre of game, I would recommend playing your first playthrough in the casual difficulty. Saying this, the game is not as fast as others in this genre but has constant waves of enemies coming at you from all directions, which is still a thorough challenge in the lowest difficulty mode.

As I mentioned above, there are 4 worlds to clear. Each world has 6 stages to complete which includes a boss to defeat at the end of 5 of the 6 stages. You must successfully complete one world at a time to unlock the next one.

As you start your first playthrough, you’ll start your game at the workshop with 1000 credits on hand. With these credits you’ll be able to upgrade one of seven aspects of your vessel. Bear in mind, all upgrades cost a fair few credits. In any case, you can decide to upgrade your main weapons (lasers), secondary weapons (which vary from missiles to additional guns), engine, armour, repair bots (2 of them) and your special weapon. Then, you are ready to launch your first mission.

As you are going through the stages, enemies (60 different types in total) will come from all angles. Some will come straight at you without firing any sort of projectiles while others will be shooting missiles, electric waves and others nasty projectiles. What you need to be very careful of is the health and your armour bar which is located on the top left side of your screen. Each of these bars has 10 blocks in them. Each time your vessel is hit by a projectile or smashed into by an enemy vessel, one of these blocks will disappear. First it will be the armour bar (the blue one) then your health bar (the green one). Don’t despair, as you destroy incoming enemies, they will drop coloured gems which will add onto your credits, or occasionally blue or orange canisters. The blue canisters will give you back an additional 25% armour when you pick them up while the orange ones will give you 25% towards your special weapon. That’s right, there is another bar which is orange and is dedicated to your special weapons. It will increase slowly but when it reaches is full capacity, you’ll be able to use the special weapon to get out of trouble. At the end of the 1 to 4 missions, you’ll have to face a boss fight, which are always fun to play. The five missions of each world are basically missions to destroy as many enemies as possible, gather as many gems as you can and upgrade your vessel with the best arsenal to defeat the main boss, which is at the end of the six missions.

 What I really like in this game is that you can upgrade your vessels after each mission, but it will always depend on how many gems you have managed to collect.

I must say that I was extremely impressed with the visuals. They are absolutely stunning all the way through the 4 worlds. I also like the fact that it is not as fast as other games of this genre, but it’s still a challenging game nonetheless - trust me, try the normal difficulty and you’ll understand what I mean. In terms of controls, it’s a game that you must play with a gamepad, in my opinion. It’s ok with a keyboard but it’s more fun with a gamepad.  There are a couple of things that the developer needs to address.  The first one is the vibrating gamepad; occasionally you get hit and your gamepad will keep vibrating for a while (a minute or so) which is a bit annoying, to be honest. The other thing I found is that the sound cuts off periodically for a few seconds. Apart from that, it’s pretty good!