Xbox Indie Review: Shoot 1UP

Go check your couch cushions.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.  Cram your hands down past the crumbs and stale potato chips.  Find a quarter?  Maybe a few dimes?  Excellent, you’re already on your way to purchasing Shoot 1UP!

I used to walk to the 7-11 to play Raiden II when I was a kid and this game really pushed the nostalgia buttons in my brain.  If it was released during the heyday of the Super Nintendo’s lifecycle, it would probably be remembered fondly as one of the best games of the generation, or at least undoubtedly one of the better top-down shooters of the generation.

So the gist of the game is fairly straightforward.  Control a ship, move it around the screen and annihilate everything in your path with your arsenal of colorful lasers until you reach an enormous boss.  Its simple and straightforward and a heck of a lot of fun.  The twist on the formula is that there are floating 1up powerups that appear in the remnants of some foes which provide additional ships.  Each powerup gives you another ship to control and they appear quite rapidly, so within minutes you are already controlling a fleet of six or seven ships on the screen at once.  With more ships comes more firepower, and the enormous pillars of energy your enclave can produce is quite the spectacle.

Of course each of those ships will go down with one hit and with enemy fire permeating about the screen it can be a bit difficult to control all your ships at once.  Thankfully you can suck all your ships into one spot so you can navigate through the hail of fire easily and then expand the fleet again at will.  The only downside to this is that in the condensed form your fleet will produce less firepower themselves.

The game runs very smoothly with bright colorful graphics and a cool bio-techno design for the enemies.  I didn’t get a chance to mess around with the co-op, but there is an option for a second player.  Simply put, this game is an absolute no-brainer for a buck.

Visit the Xbox Marketplace to download a free demo of Shoot 1UP
Mommy’s Best Game’s website
Shoot 1UP was purchased from the Xbox Indie Marketplace for 80 MS points ($1) and this review is based on the full version of the game.

About Mike Wall

Mike grew up and lives near Philadelphia and has been intrigued with games ever since his parents preached that they rotted his brain. He studied journalism at Penn State and got his master's degree in secondary education before realizing that not even summers off would make that job palatable. He now works in marketing and is trying to find time to continue writing a book about zombies, aliens, vampires, the end of the world, and a talking cat.