There are more shmups than you can shmup in your lifetime. A Shooter, is another side-scrolling shmup, and it’s an Xbox LIVE Arcade Indie game meaning that it’s not from any of the large development studios. It’s not even from the small development studios, it’s just a small team or group of friends who and it’s built on XNA. In this case Sorcery Games who have now put out four XBLIG titles (PellMell, Aceball, A Dreamland Chronicles Game). That means that the production values aren’t quite as high as if the game had been made in a studio, but still it’s not too shabby.

Now, if you’re a fan of old school Amiga demos then you’ll love the graphics in this title. If you don’t remember that time or weren’t around you might think the graphics somewhat dated. The side-scrolling starfield, the bounce scroll lettering won’t remind you of a time long ago when computers at home were still a novelty and arcades were still open in major cities. Even the music, a heavy-guitar-fueled number, lends itself to a time when Top Gun was in the box office.

But it doesn’t mean that the game is any less fun or not worth your time. If you’re a hardcore shmup fan you might find this game simplistic. It’s certainly not the manic affair that Japanese Shmups tend to be with hundreds of enemies on the screen at a time, zooming about in crazy attack patterns with a hundred more bullets on screen than ships. There are four difficulty levels in the game (Easy, Normal, Hard and Hardest) which will help ramp things up for you in a hurry. Also, once you complete a level in a game you can then begin at that level in the next game.

At the end of each level there’s a boss. They don’t really ever change except for color and the speed of their attacks. The attack patterns vary but not as intricately in some other games. They get faster, shoot more bullets but mostly move in an up and down direction with some push forward attacks.

In fact, the flight paths of almost all of the enemies in the game are very simplistic. Most move in a single direction left to right. Some move in a top to bottom or bottom to top direction but they almost all have only only direction of movement. There are a few that have a more complex pattern but even the attack patterns in Galaga have this one beat. The size of the enemies is a major factor in this game as some will be extremely small, and difficult to hit, and some will be quite large and require numerous shots while also eating up valuable maneuvering space.

Also, there’s no life meter, so you have no visual indication of how many hits your ship might sustain before you explode. Plus, you’ve only got one life and there’s no way to acquire more in the game that I could see. So as I said, it’s a more simplistic shmup than many others.

The game also features up to four player co-op so you and a couple friends can take on hordes of aliens together. Entertaining and I always like a good co-op session.

It’s a fun little diversion now and again and for the price you can’t really complain, it’s 80 MPS or $1 roughly (depending on where you are).