I first came across Charlie’s Games whilst wandering around Direct2Drive’s indie section – well, strictly speaking I’d already played Space Phallus but didn’t put two and two together until an impulse purchase of Bullet Candy EX whilst I was at the till with a copy of Witch-Bot Meglilo (and there’ll be more on that here at some point) and to be brutally honest I didn’t really enjoy Bullet Candy as much as I’d hoped. I suspect that’s because it “arrived” at Bullet Mechanics HQ at around the same time Geometry Wars: Galaxies and a Wii Classic Controller reared their respective vectorised and plastic heads, but for the pennies that Charlie was asking I certainly didn’t regret the purchase.
So around a week ago when some of the indie gaming blogs I follow mentioned Charlie’s latest release, rather than downloading the demo and spending a while umm-ing and ahh-ing about actually purchasing it, I did my best “I’ll by that for a dollar” impression whilst throwing a couple of the aforementioned at him, grabbed the full game, played a couple of times whilst I got the controls configured the way I wanted and after that it was a case of not resurfacing for around four hours when the caffeine levels in my blood finally dipped far enough to make the entire world go blurry rather than just the screen.
Irukandji is a score attack shooter so, unlike games where the emphasis is on completion, in this case the objective is to rack up as many points as possible before sending the score to the interwebs to laud it over other players and/or get laughed at. To that end, Irukandji only has the one level, set in an underwater trench that is inhabited by hordes of glowing marine life, and the player is left to their own devices as to how they maximise their scoring within that level. There are six ships each with their own main cannon and mega weapon (four of them have, the fifth offers a damage multiplier and the sixth instead has “hyper mode” on the main guns when fully charged) to collect in total, each requiring a different approach to use properly.
After a number of nasties have been atomised, the player is rewarded with a power-up item; to begin with these are P icons that power up the ship’s weaponry and once it’s been maxed out they change for S icons that bump the score multiplier and it’s learning how to use that multiplier and indeed how to farm for as many S pods as possible with each ship that is a major factor when going for the big bucks. Another requirement is that the player doesn’t die at any point, the reward for a “perfect” single life completion is always welcome and death powers the ship down and resets the multiplier.
I’ve never been a score or indeed achievement whore personally (which is incredibly ironic when you know that both Vinculum and Quantizer are about maximising score) but I was well and truly grabbed by Irukandji and at the time of writing have seven of the eight achievements lit, all six ships unlocked and rank in the top ten online scores with four of those six ships – I am needless to say rather smug about that, irrationally so in fact considering the chasm between my scores and those at the top of the table. In fact, this post would have been up about forty five minutes earlier if I’d not spent most of that time trying a few potential ways to up my score!
Charlie is only asking a minimum donation of a dollar for Irukandji and, whilst it’s not a huge epic of a game, there’s enough in there to keep most players busy and those with a truly competitive nature are going to bloody love the thing. If you’re not sure there’s the demo and you can try before you buy, but if you consider yourself a shoot ‘em up fan, at the very least give it a whirl.
