Booster Trooper, from DNS Development, is a side-scrolling 2D shooter that gives you several different weapons, grenades and a jetpack to take on a never-ending army of respawning enemies. The game is fairly basic as it only requires four direction keys and the mouse.

The game offers four familiar modes - deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and destroy the beacon (demolition) in both single player and online multiplayer. However, I was unable to find anyone online playing the game. That’s not to say no one is playing it as there are some global leaderboards, it just seems like they don’t play often. So I was limited to the single player experience which only allows for deathmatch and team deathmatch. This is most likely due to limited AI intelligence.

The AI intelligence limitations can be seen in their movements which will often find them stuck under a platform or an outcropping and unable to free themselves. That doesn’t mean that they’re not challenging as they have amazing eye sight and seem to be able to know where you are and shoot you even when they’re not actually on the screen. Even when they’re on screen, they’re highly accurate and there’s no way to change it except for a hardcore mode which I would guess is tougher than normal.

Also, the bots are extremely resilient in that you can pump a half clip of bullets into them and they’ll still be standing. I even caught one in a grenade blast and put some bullets into them and they killed me first. Now I’m not saying I’m awesome at this type of game, but a grenade blast and several bullets should put down just about anyone, especially if less damage puts me down. I did play several matches to 50 kills and was able to outstrip the bots by an almost 2-to-1 margin.

The graphics consist of static background images with platforms built into them for boosting up onto while you fight. There are nine maps in all and they range from mines to high rises, shrines to factories. A few of them look like almost exact copies of each other with just a new color scheme (factory and Scrapyard namely) giving you less variety than you might think. They’re not all that exceptional in any way.