Retro/Grade Demo Impressions

Retro/Grade is a game with a pretty cool concept. You play a side-scrolling space shooter, but instead of things moving forward and you shooting them, something got messed up with the space/time continuum and everything is moving in reverse. This changes the entire game from a Shooter into a Rhythm game, and the developers are aware of this, too. They even have what they call a "Rhythm Mode" that will let you play the game using a guitar controller. You can still play this mode with a keyboard or controller, however.

I personally like playing what they call the "Shooter Mode" better, and it's at it's best when using a controller. The keyboard controls work fine, but this game seems like it was made for use with a controller, I actually hooked up my 360 controller to my PC to play it.

The way you play the game is by collecting your shots that you had previously fired, while you travel backwards through time. You do this with the Spacebar, or A button on the controller. Each level has a simple beat track playing on top of it. The songs in the levels so far are kind of floaty and slow. While they only gave us two levels in the demo, I imagine it's not much different for the rest of them, although I would like to get some faster songs in there, just for the challenge.

Speaking of challenge, the game has 5 difficulty modes... newb, casual, mediumcore, pro, and l33t. Needless to say, those are some pretty awesome names, and the rest of the presentation in the game doesn't suffer either. Like I said before, we get Two levels in the demo, Level 10 and Level 9... since you unlock Level 9 after beating 10, this makes me think that the full game will have you traveling backwards through levels, which is a pretty cool concept. Not only that, but the names of the two levels are hilarious. We've got "Rick Rollin'" and "All your bass are belong to us".

Overall, Retro/Grade seems like a fun little indie game which is definitely worth checking out. If you haven't yet, you can download the demo from Steam. Be sure to look forward to the full game, coming out later this year.