Cyclops

Cyclops is an offering from Hikoza T. Ohkubo, who brought us Warning Forever; and it's cut from pretty similar cloth. The game throws level after level of hostility at you, upping the difficulty level time. Your mission is much the same too: destroy everything, or at least everything that you are capable of destroying.

A contemptuous sweep of the laser.

Gameplay's quite different this time around. In Warning Forever you flew a ship with a posable turret around, blowing chunks off a vast, monolitic enemy. In Cyclops you stay in the middle of the screen, rotating to train your laser on waves of fighters and other enemies as they come at you.

The controls are nice and simple. Move your mouse back and forth to rotate; left mouse button to fire. That's all there is to it. Simple? You'll see. It's certainly easy to start with. Small clusters of fighters come at you, only to be swept away with a contemptuous wave of the laser beam. But then the training wheels soon come off: larger enemies with no guns make their debut, drifting towards your craft, requiring a few seconds of sustained fire to finish them off; just enough time for another wave of fighters to sneak in round the back. Strange, revolving, reflective discs appear soon after, as do indestructible asteroids and a third enemy ship that orbits your own avatar, pelting you with even more gunfire.

Burn!
Burn!

That's where the inherent limitations of your own weaponry come into play. Your defences come in two parts: a circular force-field and a laser. The force-field protects you from enemy gunfire, and I don't think the laser needs much explanation. However, the two items are mutually exclusive. While the laser fires, the force-field is down and you're vulnerable. If you want to avoid damage from enemy bullets, you have to shoot them out of the sky with your laser.

As powerful as the laser is, it has only a limited charge, requiring a little while to juice up. Worse, the craft can't rotate particularly quickly, so if you want to escape injury, you have to time your counter-attacks carefully. Enemy fighters can be picked off en masse, but as the waves grow more frequent and numerous, you really have to learn how to bounce your laser beam off the reflective discs to maximise your destructive capability.

A handy ricochet.

I do have one major niggle with this game, though: the sound. Put simply, there isn't any. Not a zap, not an explosion; nothing. Alright, the game might be based in space, but that never stopped a game developer before! Still, a glimpse at the website says this is version 0.80. Hopefully the reason for this game's quietness is that there's still a way to go in the game's development cycle. Then again, the game was released last year, so frankly I don't know what to think.

All in all, though, promising. Give it another update or two and it'd be a worthy successor to Warning Forever. The presence of the mirrors gives the game a feel reminiscent of Deflector, making it a welcome change from other shooters.