Review: Retro/Grade

Retro/Grade (2012)

Developer: 24 Caret Games

Platform: Personal Computer, PlayStation 3

Induction Date: 11/28/2014, 08/25/2012

It seems like the music-shooter genre hybrid is a great place to find inspiration and success for game developers as yet another fascinating creation has arrived on the scene. Retro/Grade is mainly a rhythm action music game but its near-genius implementation of shoot-'em-up elements has certainly made it the most intriguing combination of those two genres thus far.

Slurp that long strand of laser back into the ship.

In Retro/Grade, you play as Rick Rocket who has encountered a temporal anomaly caused by a massive destruction he left in his wake when he finally saved the universe. This caused him to move backwards in time as weapons are being unfired from both sides of the battle. You can only move vertically in the game, occupying one color coded lane at a time. Your shots move back towards you from these lanes and you have to make sure that you are on the right lane, ready to unfire your weapon when they actually reach your ship: you have to do all of this while avoiding enemy bullets that are travelling back into the enemy ships. It's an extraordinary concept, so much so that the game ready does feel like a shooter, a passive one that is, because of all those bullets that you have to constantly unfire and avoid. With such a radical, clever idea, it is disappointing however that the narrative part of the game did not receive that much care. With great masterpieces in shmup history carrying fantastical stories, like Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun, it would have been great to concoct more involving situations surrounding Rick's dilemma. One of the game's stages is actually called Rick Rollin' and in another, Rick's battle was fueled by the need for coffee, so you get my drift. I do get the tongue-in-cheek humor but I just strongly feel that there is a missed opportunity here.

See the big bad boss get reassembled piece by piece in front of your eyes.

Thankfully, the game's delicious retro-inspired soundtrack takes a darker and more epic tone than the game's cheesy tale. Some of tracks sounded a bit too similar to each other but they are very catchy so it's easy to get yourself  deeply lost in the rhythm tapping. Similarly impressive is the game's astute understanding of the type of death-defying bravado we come to expect in a shmup: the maneuvers that you will be making throughout the course of the game's 10 levels are quite tricky because you basically have to weave in-between enemy bullets while un-shooting and survive near misses from the enemies' relentless retuning attacks. To help with the demanding display of shmup prowess, the game provides you with a limited ability to reverse your mistake - that is, return time back to its chronological state - and though this action should only be used sparsely and in a perfect run, it is not even needed, it is fun to watch how the action looks when it's not reversed. It's cool that at the end of the level, your entire performance is then reversed so that you can watch the entirety of that session as a forward moving shooter. Retro/Grade is visually beautifuly with its fluid 1080p, 60 frames per second presentation. I love how fast the backgrounds move and that there are always a variety of things to see within them. It's funny that independent PlayStation 3 releases can achieve 1080p when almost the entirety of the bigger releases can't.

Pay attention to the colors...

In addition to the game's campaign, Retro/Grade also comes with a lengthy challenge mode. There are 130 challenges in all scattered across a galaxy map and it is here that you can unlock additional contents for the game like artwork, cheats, alternate ship models (Octodad for the win), and tracks for a functioning turntable. The problem with challenge mode is its lack of variety and shorter challenges would have fit better here instead of having players go through the entirety of a level to progress through the mode. There is always an unlockable just several challenges away however and it is keeping me motivated to continue on. I personally enjoy just playing the campaign because, just like in a typical shmup, I just love to strive for better performance and score - and of course in Retro/Grade, the score goes down the better you perform. It helps tremendously that every mode of play has its own leaderboards: the challenges included.

The difficulty progression in campaign is not reversed but it's well explained.

2012 has been an uneventful PS3 year for me but Retro/Grade has changed that. It is by far the most exciting game released on the platform this year. The game can also be played with a guitar controller - as a matter of fact, the "X-Treme" difficulty level is near impossible with the controller unless you have really, really, really fast fingers. Retro/Grade is available for purchase on the PlayStation Network Store for $9.99. It is also bundled with the soundtrack for $14.99. If you choose to get the soundtrack at a later time, it is available separately for $7.99. Shmup fans are the ones who would benefit the most out of this game because of the potential appreciation for its overwhelming genre aesthetics but the game can easily be enjoyed by others as well.

RATING: 4 out of 5

Game key provided by developer.