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INTRODUCTION
Did you ever want to fly a spaceship that shoots lasers but can also do melee attacks somehow? Well, you kind of get to do that in ANIQUILATION. Developed by R-Next and published by Gamera Games, ANIQUILATION is a game with a lot of cool ideas but none of the execution. It is a twin stick shooter, that can be played as singleplayer or multiplayer. Let us start without further ado.
GAMEPLAY
As I mentioned at the start, there are cool ideas ANIQUILATION has regarding gameplay. But one of the problems the game has is, there are too many ideas, and none of them are polished enough feel good. None of these mechanics are brand new. You will have seen them before in that game or other. If the dev team could’ve fleshed out their core gameplay this game would have been better.
You have a spaceship, and you will shoot enemy ships, big mecha enemies, and buildings throughout your missions. Also, there’s a small minigame of sorts between missions. The missions are quite basic and unimaginative. The enemies are pretty much the same. What I did like was the fact that some enemies only take damage from weapons or melee attacks. Although I only played singleplayer, I felt that something was off with the balance. I suppose you except to be overwhelmed in a twin stick shooter, but that overwhelming is only fun, if there is breathing room afterwards. From start to finish of a mission ANIQUILATION doesn’t give you any breathing rooms. And at the end you’re just glad the mission is over.
Most of my frustration with this game comes from how it “feels” to play it. The controls are clunky, the terraformed planets are buggy. Moving doesn’t feel good, shooting doesn’t feel good. Honestly there wasn’t a single mechanic in the shooting gameplay, where I felt that mechanic was executed well. I did not enjoy my time with ANIQUILATION generally because of this reason.
TECHNICAL SIDE AND STORY
My general thoughts on the story are quite brief. This game doesn’t want to be a storyteller. And that’s okay. Not all games need to be great storytellers. It’s a cliché story, with cliché characters, where nothing interesting happens. But once again, the story isn’t the selling point of this game, so all of this is forgivable.
Now onto the technical side. Things are even worse here I feel. The graphics are bad. Not like “they have their own unique style, but it just didn’t appeal to me” bad, more like “these graphics are so bad this game should not have come out in 2022” bad. I’m honestly one of those people who don’t really care about graphics if the mechanics are solid. But they aren’t. So yes, this game fails on gameplay, story, and graphics.
There is one positive thing in between all these failed attempts. And it is the music. I really enjoyed the soundtrack of this game. Big kudos to whoever made it. It fits the game perfectly. Communicates the atmosphere of the game well too.
CONCLUSION
This game really was not my cup of tea. I felt that it failed on almost everything it set out to accomplish. While some parts are objectively bad, the game does have some good ideas. I hope next time, this team can try to execute their ideas better and give us a more satisfying to play twin stick shooter.
