

[While the new Indie Royale game bundle that we co-created with Desura is running, we’ll be profiling each of the four games featured in it, giving our honest opinion on the pluses and minuses of each title. First up, we have Radiangames’ psychedelic arcade shoot ’em up Super Crossfire. ]







With all the recent news of Atari’s crusade against intellectual property infringement, I can’t help but wonder if they would issue a ‘cease and desist’ to Radiangames or an offer to purchase Super Crossfire for exorbitant amounts of money.







If you enjoyed Space Invaders or any of the hundreds of variants that it has spawned over the years, you’ll probably enjoy Super Crossfire. In spite of its love for neon-slathered pyrotechnics and snazzy techno-trance soundtrack, Super Crossfire is not too different from its forerunner. Here, you shoot or be shot. It’s as simple as that.









That said, Super Crossfire does have one little twist and it’s a surprisingly effective one. While the little ship that you pilot is largely constrained to the x-axis: your vehicle also commands something that many of its peers do not: the ability to instantly move between the top and bottom of the screen.







At a glance, it’s difficult to imagine this as anything other than a gimmick but it works. Much like the enemies in its predecessor, the geometrical menagerie that you face in Super Crossfire aren’t too intelligent. More often than not, it takes them awhile to fix upon your current orientation, allowing you free rein to, well, rain plasma-induced death upon them but that’s not a bad thing. The difficulty in Super Crossfire quickly ramps up with every passing wave and sooner or later, when your screen is nothing but a psychedelic barrage of colors, you’ll be thankful that they can’t target to save their hypothetical lives.







Don’t get me wrong. This doesn’t make the game easy. Though it lacks the complexity of a bullet hell, you will have to be fast on your feet as you cross from one end of the battlefield to another. One mistake is all it takes to undo many minutes of homicidal work. Super Crossfire also seems to delight in literally throwing you into the line of fire. See that enemy right over there? He has a shield on his back so you can’t punch a hole through him that way. You’re going to have to stand under his missiles to kill him. Good luck. He has plenty of friends.







Though each stage is essentially a repetition of the same formula, Super Crossfire keeps things interesting by providing a decent variety of enemies (big enemies, small enemies, enemies with beams, enemies with shields, enemies without shields, enemies with goddamned warp blockers) and an upgrade system that will allow you to tinker with everything from your rate of fire to your effectiveness at gem collection.







What brings it all together, however, is how damn slick the whole thing is. There’s a no-nonsense vibe to everything and the controls are as simple as a sledgehammer to the skull. You control your ship with your mouse, your shots with your left mouse button, your warping with your right mouse button and your Super Shot (it unleashes beams of energy that tunnel through everything) with your middle mouse button. No special buttons. No unnecessary animations in the interface. Nothing. Super Crossfire does everything it can to keep you focused on what matters most: the genocide of your alien adversaries.







What more do you need?







Official website here, and you can buy it as part of Indie Royale’s ‘New Year Bundle’ for the next few days.