Game Review: Comet Buster/Blaster

Comet Buster Blaster is an obvious Asteroids clone-type game that has some potential, but largely falls short.

Things start to seem off pretty early. The title of the game given on its Armor Games page is "Comet Buster," but when you look at the game itself, its internal name is "Comet Blaster."

Things get even spottier in its "tutorial" screen.

You're supposed to mouse over things to get information on them, but 1) the areas which you're supposed to mouse over are vaguely defined, and 2) as seen above, some of the information is... shoddily entered into the box. (The power-ups, in case you're interested, are "nuke," "extra health," "full health," "shoot faster," and "invulnerable.")

The tutorial explains that you can change the color of your "bullets" to match particular enemies and that you get extra points by killing enemies with the matched bullets. An interesting feature of the game is that your cursor tells you how much life you have, although it wasn't really very intuitive or helpful.

However, I wasn't really interested enough in these tactics to pay them much mind; instead, I just figured out (by accident) that there's a simple tactic that makes you almost invincible. Here it is:

It's just like the old final boss of the second Legend of Zelda game-if you're in a corner, you can't lose.

In fact, I had a twitchy middle finger while I was playing, and it kept hitting the right mouse button, which opened menus and disrupted my aim... and I only died once when that happened, despite often taking a minute or more to straighten out the situation and there being enemies who chase you.

The only reason I eventually reached the final screen was because I got bored and started flying in crazy circles.

So I played for over twenty minutes just by sitting in the corner and shooting out.

On the positive side, the control scheme is the nice arrow keys to maneuver, mouse to aim system that I like so well, and it's got great music. It's so great, I'd suggest just letting the game go to the game over screen and listening to it while doing things in another tab or window.

I'm doing that now, in fact.

So I can strongly recommend the music (which sadly doesn't seem to exist outside of the game anywhere), anyway.

-Signing off.