DiscStorm Review

DiscStorm is a fast-pace arena battling game. It is designed in pixel graphics and 16-bit-like music. It is absolutely challenging and needs a lot of practice to be good at. If you are old enough to remember the times when gaming was still a challenge, this game will take you right back and make you remember how fast your reactions used to be. Basically, it will make you feel like Adam Sandler in Pixels.

Now that I brought it up, let me address Adam Sandler real quick before we continue. Dude, the things in your movie, those aren’t pixels, those are voxels, pixels are two-dimensional (picture-elements), voxels are three-dimensional (volume-elements). Seriously, did nobody at Happy Madison Productions bring that up? I don’t get it. This is so wrong. It bugs me. It really does.

Anyways, DiscStorm is one of those games that seem to divide community and reviewers. While the community reviews are pretty good, reviewers draw a different picture of this game. So let’s break it down step-by-step. The game idea itself is pretty new, sure you have played games that are about running around in an arena shooting stuff at people, but the whole concept of having to pick the disks up again and calculating the angles so might even be able catch them mid-air when they return to you, there is something new and exciting there.

Thanks to Minecraft and Terraria, pixel graphics are having their renaissance right now, so there is no shame in going for this particular kind of art, which could be considered a bit out of date. As for right now, it is widely accepted as a viable style to design your game in. The soundtrack, which can be bought separately complements this art style very well.

The story mode is almost story-less. Not obsolete, but there is no real story to speak of. Shoot disks, deflect disks, catch disks, all day long. The levels are hard but manageable, the design is good enough to not get you frustrated over enemies or traps you can’t see properly.

The multiplayer is local only. I guess it could be a lot of fun online and there are rumors that an online multiplayer mode will be patched in, but as of right now, the whole multiplayer menu point is utterly useless since you won’t find any friend who will be fun to play against. Do you remember the time when you went home with a friend after school and he challenged you to a game of Super Smash Brothers, but you didn’t have a Game Cube yourself so he easily kicked your ass over and over again and ultimately neither of you had fun? This is what happens when you try to play DiscStorm against a friend.

For what it is worth, whenever it says “Made with Unity – Personal Edition” when I open up a game, I am awestruck with respect and admiration. I absolutely love the creative achievements of  indie game developers and I think it is amazing if someone masters this art. The guys at XMPT Games are evidently very talented and have the ability to make great games, but I am afraid, this is not it.

I guarantee you will love this game when you play it. I guarantee you won’t understand why brashgames.co.uk has rated this game so mediocrely, but I also guarantee that you will not play this game for more than 10 hours. You will get bored with this title quicker than you can say “I should have just kept playing Bomberman for free”.

And this my friends is why there is such a discrepancy between the critics of the net and the community ratings: The community enjoys the game as long as they play it, but the critics are telling you that you will not play for long.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.