You wait cautiously, as a bright green ship prepares to deliver its payload and cash in its haul of hard earned gemstones. The trap is set, ready for you to spring forward scattering a laser-light show of plasma beams across the abyss of space, straight into the hull of the unsuspecting emerald craft. As the ill-fated victim crumbles from your savage ambush, the spoils of war begin to drift amongst the stars, ready for the taking. Don’t be too hasty to count your space coins though, as seconds later a marauding band of space pirates deliver some swift karmic justice, making short work of your own crimson shuttle in a hail of gunfire. Space is no picnic, and Cashtronauts aims to prove that only the wiliest of space capitalists will emerge victorious.

The basic concept of Cashtronauts has you competing (or co-operating) against other players as you attempt to accrue the most money from the opportunities floating around in space. Mine asteroids, raid space pirates, or rob your friends of their hard earned cash, all in the confines of a 2D slice of deep space.  The game’s designer Simon Prefontaine describes it best as a ”Top down, twin stick, space-combat/trading party game with multiplayer”.

It’s an undoubtedly big list of interlocking features, enough to make me more than sceptical of what Prefontaine is hoping to achieve. Luckily, along with his Kickstarter campaign Simon has released an early demo version of the game to the public, with many of the basic features already in place for would-be naysayers like me to try out.

The first thing you notice is that the controls are tight, impressively so for such an early demo, and I’m instantly reminded of the slick sliding 2D movement found in twin stick shooters like Geometry Wars. The fact that it’s in space adds to the motion as well, with thrust and momentum playing a big factor in how you pilot your craft.  The zero-gravity adds the feeling of flexibility that gives a great sense of feedback when you’re flying around.

Cashtronauts structures its gameplay around one of two game modes. Skirmish, which is currently the only available mode in the demo, is a local multiplayer versus mode in which up to 4 players vie for the highest score by the end of a timed round. The second mode is called Venture, and could be considered the game’s campaign. In Venture mode you have to get as far across the galaxy as possible, stopping in each system to gather up enough cash to afford the toll on the warp gates scattered across space.

Cashtronauts is shaping up to be a strange beast. I only spent a few minutes with the game and it was easy to pinpoint Prefontaine’s inspirations. The controls are already fine-tuned and as responsive as you could ask for, and the focus on local multiplayer in every aspect of the game could easily see this project become a great entry to your couch co-op line-up.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Sanatana Mishra from Witch Beam Studios flew all the way from Australia to attend this year’s Eurogamer Expo, so naturally we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk about his current twin stick shooter Assault Android Cactus, as well as his experiences with publishing on the next wave of consoles.

For more information on Assault Android Cactus check out their official site here.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

And it’s a shame to start the review off in such a negative way, because the execution works well and offers some level of fun gameplay. The tower defense section is your standard fare, but it’s executed solidly. Problem is, it can all get a little overwhelming when combined with the action shooting sections. If you compare it to something like FTLgame’s Faster Than Light, which blends tactical play with the general housekeeping of your ship, Straco simply doesn’t hold up as well when merging its two separate elements together.

The heads-up display (HUD) in Straco is an explosion of information that would have benefited from being trimmed down. Perhaps it’s just a personal preference, but the cluttered screen during gameplay is just an eyesore. And between the HUD and the chaos of the general gameplay, you have no idea where to look half the time.

Graphically Straco doesn’t stand out, but ironically that is what makes it different from other similar games. Many games on the XBLA Indie Marketplace try to go way above their level, which means either the gameplay suffers or the artwork looks out of place. Here, the sprites are clean and functional and the background is a patchwork of colours that represent sea, ground, forest and so on. The only shame is that the environment has no effect on your movement or abilities, whether you’re on foot or in the giant mechanical machine. This renders the change of colours more or less useless, but at least it’s better than a 100×100 grid of grey.

It’s understandable that games created by small teams, one or two people will multitask between programming, art, and audio. But that doesn’t excuse how poor and misplaced the soundtrack for this game is. It honestly might have been better to avoid using music altogether and take the Desert Strike route – especially with the helicopter sections.

Straco is by no means a bad game, but it just suffers from trying to spin too many plates at once. The minefield that is the tutorials and controls will turn off many players before they even get halfway through the first mission. And with Straco planned as the first of a series of episodic games, it will be difficult to see each episode garnering any new players. Straco has potential, it just needs major fine-tuning to realise any of that potential.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.