If you play only one twin-stick shooter this month, make it 'JASEM: Just Another Shooter with Electronic Music' [Steam] as it's properly good.

It's not just a stupidly long name (come on, this is just silly), it's a colourful and bright twin-stick shooter that released for Linux back in October of last year. It arrived pretty quickly after I personally asked about it on Steam, so I was pleased to see the developer offer us a copy through our Steam Curator.

I will start by saying two things: It's not easy and there's a lot of flashing lights, to the point that it probably will give you some kind of fit if you're sensitive to that sort of thing. Just to be clear on that one. Thankfully not an issue for me, so I was making everything I possibly could explode.

Your mission is simple: blow shit up. That's it, there's no story to worry about, no dialogue, just fast-paced roller-coaster action that keeps on going. There's lots of fun design choices, like how firing your weapon slowly moves you backwards, you can knock almost everything around by driving into it and it seems you're given a random set of weapons each time.

My first death was quick, as I came up against two tower that spewed out blinding purple beams that covered the entire walkway and from there, the death counter just continued to climb up steadily. Naturally, I found out quite early how easy it is to blow yourself up:



Tip: Barrels explode—who would have guessed?

The weapons are really damn fun too: homing bullets, rockets, grenades, flamethrowers and so on. The amount of destruction you can cause is just insane and it’s resulted in a game that has never failed to amuse and excite me—there’s just never a dull moment! Even if you get stuck on a level for a while (like me), you will notice that not everything is the same each time, making repeated runs actually quite enjoyable too.

There's even boss fights to go through, so expect to die and die again. They're much bigger than the normal enemies and just as fun to face in battle. You might want to bring a container along though, for a bit of added protection…

Here's a video of some more of the utterly mental action in JASEM, played by yours truly:

I'm still impressed driving a container across that gap worked, that was quite hilarious. Like a make-shift tank.

You can find JASEM on Steam now. I highly recommend it! It's a frantic and downright fun experience. I really hope the developer continues to improve on it for a second game with a ton more content, I would happily purchase it.