Written by James Nicolay
Title: Earth Atlantis
Developer: Pixel Perfex
Publisher: Headup Games
Genre: Action, Shoot-‘Em-Up
Price: $14.99
The narrative is quite thin in Earth Atlantis: around a century from now, the world is completely submerged. You will control a basic looking submarine (shoot with ZR and turn to the other direction with ZL) and navigate under water in search of bosses while picking up power upgrades along the way. There are 38 bosses all in all and some odd mechanical-robotic sea creatures—all of these bosses are staged with fantastic orchestral music, which ramps up the excitement or anxiety of the player.
The visuals reminded me a lot of some of the paper-brown early sketches of Leonardo Da Vinci—think of the likes of Vitruvian Man—pencil/ink sketches on brown/sepia paper. Hence, the hand-drawn quality of the entire game is nothing to scoff at. The obstacle with this chosen art style is that some of the areas of the overworld are confusing as some paths initially seem un-passable because the drawings of broken steel bars from drowned buildings are not too different looking from ones that are passable. The only clear clues are to look for enemies who are swimming through these faux-obstacles. But this is just a minor flaw. Some popular landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty makes an appearance underwater: very cryptic and cool at the same time.
The power-ups are randomly dropped by the enemies: some are bombs, missiles, homing rockets, and each time you get a P bubble, your submarine gets more powerful with more ammunition firing from both sides of the submarine. You get to unlock other submarines when you finish the entire quest or by defeating all the 38 bosses spread all over a singular deep aquatic overworld; every time a boss is defeated, a new path opens up. The map on the screen is too simplistic—I strongly suggest that you read carefully the how-to-play option in the menu and familiarize yourself with the legend of the map.
After defeating about a dozen of bosses, I got frustrated with one boss that has the ability to destroy my submarine in two hits. The annoying thing is that the difficulty of this boss is way too early in Earth Atlantis and no matter how powered up my submarine is, it hardly matters as my submarine explodes when it gets contact with the boss twice. Every time my submarine explodes and I go for the continue option, I go back to a save point and I have to grind a bit in order to get powered up again—and this becomes annoying as no matter how powered up the submarine is, it still explodes after two hits from that boss. Hence, some ninja skills are required in defeating this boss. Or at least, maybe, the power-ups should feel useful and appropriate in defeating some bosses, rather than just mindlessly firing weapons at them.
The game feels sluggish in some parts, probably dipping below 30 fps majority of the time. It’s still playable, but it would’ve been a much better experience if the exploration were smoother.
While the visuals look fantastic, there are times when I was playing Earth Atlantis that I was wishing there were more colors to it—or something to break the monotony of the visuals and the background music. I always find an excuse to forgive an indie game because of the budget of the production, but I feel that a little bit of variety in the overall presentation would’ve been more than welcome.
As an indie game, Earth Atlantis is a good game to cover one’s itch for a shoot-‘em-up experience on the Nintendo Switch. I just discovered reading online that the game actually has already been patched to balance the difficulty—but I played actually the latest version already. Maybe future patches will make this game a lot smoother with balanced difficulty. A local co-op mode actually will also be a nice addition.
Rating: 3.5/5
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