God damn you, Annihilator. I could – no – should rate you lower, but you know how much I love Smash T.V.
I truly wish I could say that this was great. The core conceit – a shit-awful future city where hooking people up to The Pain Machine and refusing to let them die generates power – is such a sick setting for a revenge story. Shinryu going on a rampage to find out what happened to his wife and daughter is the stuff 80s action movies are made of. Then you get into the gameplay and hey, it’s basically a Smash TV demake! Let’s go! That is, if the game lets you go. Good luck! Yooooooooou’ll need it!
The issues start as soon as the Game Boy logo clears. As far as I know the pre-title screen cutscene is unskippable, which should be a criminal offense punishable by a weekend in at least the level 3 pain mines. Don’t think you can mash through the dialogue either, because if you go a little too quick you’ll break it. Menu buttons will get stuck on the screen, the text boxes will be thrown partway out of frame, the levels won’t look right, it’s a whole thing. Let the game do what it wants or it’s going to pitch a fit.
Which isn’t to say it won’t pitch a fit anyway! Once it gets going it’s mostly fine, but the cracks are evident pretty quickly. You don’t have 4 buttons or a secret Game Boy second stick to aim with, you just hold the shoot button once you’re facing a direction. Usually. Sometimes if you do it too quick Shinryu just doesn’t comply, continuing to shoot where he was aiming prior despite all good sense. There’s a fair bit of inconsistency in the dash move too. Sometimes you’ll fly right by somebody and perfectly 180 to shoot them between the eyes, sometimes you just eat shit. It doesn’t grant i-frames as much as you just have a shmup-style tiny hitbox and can scoot past guys if you use it just so. Honestly I really like that, but the game’s iffy responsiveness diminishes the returns a tad.
What do you actually do? Come on, I already compared it to Smash T.V., you should know. Most of the chapters are all about shooting dudes on a single screen until you’ve murdered enough to make the flashy arrows show up on the edges. With the exception of the federally mandated vehicle section for variety that sucks a bit, that’s the game. This is not a complaint, I love this shit. Everyone’s got their particular flavor of Gamer Gruel that they could eat forever, and I’ll scarf down even the middest of top down shooters if they keep plopping them into my bowl.
The last chapter (at least on the default difficulty, no idea if things change higher up) had a particularly infuriating bug where the only room with a medkit reliably bugged out and wouldn’t let me shoot or leave. Fortunately it’s optional, so I just beat it without the help. It was a pretty sour note to end what was otherwise…fine? It was fine. Annihilator is fine. Almost aggressively so, you can practically feel how much it wants to be better than it is. Apparently Salt & Pixel is working on a fancier version for Steam and I’m genuinely curious to see how it differs once it escapes GB Studio’s rickety confines. There’s something to this one, genuine potential, and I hope that redux reaches it.
Wack Game Boy Zone 
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