Ganymede never did have much going for it. Tiny, icy, orbits the biggest ball of gas in the solar system. Not exactly prime-quality real estate. In fact, to be honest, it’s a bit of a fixer-upper as celestial bodies go, and that was before the hordes of murderous aliens moved in. Still, as far as settings for climactic life-or-death struggles go, developer Frozenbyte has clearly taken a liking to it. Ganymede, you see, is the setting for Shadowgrounds Survivor, the sequel to 2006’s Shadowgrounds.
Survivor, like its predecessor, is a top-down shooter in the classic arcade mold. You control your character with a combination of keyboard and mouse, much as you would in a first person shooter, and fight off hordes of alien adversaries in multiple episodes of frenetic action. The formula should be familiar to old school arcade junkies, as well as anyone who played the original. Actually, that’s not the only thing that will be familiar to returning customers - you’re actually fighting the same alien invasion you fought in the first title, at the same time, from three new perspectives. This time, you’re in the shoes of a rag-tag trio of survivors, each with their own unique skills and weaponry.
The new perspectives aren’t the only change in this sequel. New to the party is an RPG-lite system for upgrading both your character and weapons. As you kill enemies and accumulate experience, you gain tokens, used for unlocking new character abilities and weapon upgrades. These tokens can also occasionally be found on the corpses of your many, many enemies. You won’t be the only one packing new tricks, however - your enemies have picked up a few new ideas as well. For one thing, you no longer have to only worry about enemies charging you from the four corners of the screen. Now, they’ll clamber up cliffs to claw your face off, or burst out from underneath piles of junk to kiss you hello with toxic jaws.
Not content to just add new characters, environments, and full physics support, Survivor also adds an entirely new game mode. In the eponymous survival mode, you pick any of the three characters and fight through one of six maps, fighting to stay alive as long as you can, and maximize your score. Survival mode is pure arcade goodness, with no storyline to worry about, and all weapons unlocked from the minute you start. Unfortunately, the game lacks any kind of integrated online leaderboard, so if you want to brag about your high score, you’ll have to do it with screen shots.
The game also works hard to mix up the environments you fight in, and not just with eye candy. In one episode, you’ll be crawling through poorly lit, claustrophobic corridors, with only your shoulder-mounted flashlight to see by. In the next, you might be struggling through a thick blizzard, struggling to spot the incoming aliens through near white-out conditions; or you might be trying to keep your balance on a narrow ledge, with a thousand-foot drop on one side of you, and a pit of bubbling lava on the other. The game also tries to keep things fresh by constantly shifting you from one protagonist to another.
You start the game in control of Luke ‘Marine’ Giffords. Luke is the baseline protagonist of the game, and looks like he could have stepped off the screen of Aliens. He packs a pulse rifle, pistol, and rocket launcher. Just as you start to get tired of gunning down mobs of bugs in a hail of gunfire, you’ll find yourself in control of Bruno ‘Napalm’ Lastmann, a guy so hard up for a drink he guzzles the fuel of his flamethrower. I’m pretty sure they don’t have a twelve-step program for that. Bruno’s got problems, but he solves them with his flamethrower, shotgun, and minigun. In case you thought this was a boys-only affair, however, the final character, Isabel ‘Sniper’ Larose will be happy to disabuse you of that notion from 1,000 yards downrange. As you might imagine from her nickname, Isabel likes to keep things at arm’s length, and her sniper rifle offers the most unique shooting action of the three. When she’s not picking baddies off at maximum range, she mixes things up with a tazer-like plasma rifle, and a pistol that fires poison-laced tranquilizers. Just as you start getting tired of running through the levels on foot, you’ll find yourself in control of a turret, or a giant alien-smashing mech, ratcheting the body count up to unprecedented levels.
It’s not all good, however. The plot is a mishmash of overused sci-fi clichés, the soundtrack feels like it was lifted straight from Aliens, and what little voice-acting there is may cause ocular injuries from repetitive eye-rolling trauma. Still, a game like this isn’t about the plot, you can turn down the obnoxiously blaring soundtrack, and you can skip the cut scenes. Shadowgrounds Survivor is about delivering an overdose of frenetic arcade action, and in that vein, it’s just what the doctor ordered.
