Plasma Burst is a gore-tastic side-scroller - Time Waster

Filed under: Fun, Time-Wasters, Retrocomputing

Plasma Burst is a platformer that thinks it's an FPS. On the one hand, you get traditional side-scrolling action, but on the other hand, everything else feels like an FPS.

You play a guy "sent back in time to save the world" (back-story is always the strong side for games like this). You stroll through levels full of baddies and basically shoot them up. By default, you have a laser-like gun, but when you level up, you can buy better and better weapons.

You don't "find" the weapons, but you actually buy them in a store between levels. The screenshot above shows my guy at level 2, after I have already bought a helmet and body armor (I always go for the defensive bonuses first).

Baddies don't always die on first impact, and you have to aim carefully. One thing that bugs me is that the keyboard keys cannot be remapped, so if you happen to have a non-QWERTY layout, that can get annoying. But for the main functions, even "special" keyboards should work well. You move with the arrow keys, aim with the mouse, and shoot with SPACE. The other keys are for using items and less frequent actions (or, at least, less frequent for me because I don't have a QWERTY keyboard).

One thing you should know is that this game is pretty gory. You can dial it down a bit in the options, but there's a lot of blood all over the place, and bodies flop about in a fairly realistic fashion (as far as side-scrollers go, anyway).

Plasma Burst is a gore-tastic side-scroller - Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 26 May 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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