Zotrix was another in a series of games in a bundle from Bundle Stars.

I was expecting this one to be decent and while it tries a few nice things, and the overall execution is good, my time could of been spent playing something else rather than this one where I felt like banging my head against a solid brick wall.

In the near/far future, Humanity has spent decades getting to Mars, and decades more setting up bases over the planet. Then some dickhead aliens come along and blow everything up. So, being the plucky humans that we are, we form a series of ships and fight back.

You play a nameless hero, starting to prove their worth by shipping cargo from point to point.

And that's as much as I could be bothered following with how far I got into it. The story is basically the commander telling you 'good job on the last mission! I've a new mission for you'.

And while you don't have to stick to it and can just move from zone to zone at your own leisure, it is there if you want to read and totally skippable if you do not. This is really a plus as sometimes you just want to shoot things rather then get involved in any dodgy plot.

At each station point you can upgrade your ship with various powerups. These require not only credits but various chemical elements that are rewarded for completing a trade run.

I found that the main gun could only be upgraded to double and triple shot during waves in the various runs, but at stations you can buy side cannons, orbital drones, shields, single use missiles and bombs.

There's no obvious way to check the power difference of what you have equipped only what is available, it is really down to you, the player, to remember what you have and if the available option is more powerful. Maybe I'm missing something, but this is a rather glaring issue.

You also can't equip on this screen, only on the armoury loadout before you start a trade run. The missiles and bombs can be set or stacked to various hotkeys, and everything else has its own single slot.

Chemical Elements are not only rewarded by completing a run but can be traded at each station. On the trading page you can compare what stations have and if they are higher or lower than the station you are at. This lets you decide if you want to skip a mission run and instead do a element trade and quickly accumulate credits.

In theory this is highly exploitable, and in an hour or two you could buy/sell everything you need to have enough credits and elements to buy the most powerful goods. At this point, you're nearly indestructible, but getting there is the hard part due to some rather INSANE difficulty spikes the game throws at you.

All of this is rather good, and you tend not to see many vertical shooter games using a buy/sell-trade mechanic. The network map lets you see other stations you can fly to, and each station has a different inventory and needs.

Unfortunately the game falls apart in combat.

I really did not like the music here. Too much low quality bass and repetition, and I was expecting something more scifi or chip style.

Preferences for music aside, it just sounds shite. And the weapon SFX are also rather bland. There's no grunt to anything! I'm suppose to be blowing up alien scum, and the dull thudding I get out of the game is just not doing it for me.

And the combat.

Oh, the combat.

The first two missions are basic enough, you are tasked with proving that you can handle protecting an (invulnerable) trade convoy. Various small alien ships come from various sides of the screens, around 30-50 at a time in a continuous wave. They are dumb an donly damage you if you collide with one. It is possible to line up the gun of your ship with the mouse (or controller, you peasant) and take them out as they enter the screen.

Later into these missions enemies appear from two different points and some of them shoot at you. You can shoot out their bullets, but have to avoid them from two directions and the enemy ships themselves which can still ram you.

But there are some oddities to all of this.

Firstly, your ship has momentum, and firing the main gun will slowly push you back (as you zoom through space mind you) making it easy to get distracted and be pushed into a secondary enemy wave. The only save from this is that the space you target will not change unless you move the mouse, but! the path of your bullets may no longer match the enemy entry and exit paths.

Secondly, it is ever so easy to get overwhelmed. While you can buy sidegun power ups, you main gun gets its power from drops in the various waves. If your ship's health drops to zero, you lose a life and drop from triple to double, or double to single. Making a mistake late into the level can mean dropping back to single and then no longer having enough weapon power to shoot down the remaining enemies and bullets.

There's also a rather bad difficult spike at level 3. I was totally unprepared on how bad it gets, and from what I've read, I'm not the only one. Restarting the game a few times, I eventually found the right combination of power ups that I needed to trade to buy and then the next few levels were easy. However it happened again around level 7. Enemy ships are simply too large and numerous to combat and I just felt trapped.

There's no real sense of progression or achievement here. The game lets you stomp for a bit before lying you down on the curb with your teeth on the edge and thumping the back of you head as hard as it can. In short, really REALLY frustrating.

There's a number of things to like here. I enjoyed what Zotix was trying to bring to the genre, despite some below average music, sound, and ship designs.

But the difficulty and lack of feeling that I'm doing anything worthwhile just make it a total skip for me.

Game Acquisition: On Sale (Bundle Stars).
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 21 October 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Win XP, 7, Vista, 8
Processor: Intel 1.5 GHz
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: OpenGL compatible graphics card 512 Mb VRAM
Storage: 300 MB available space
Sound Card: Direct Sound compatible