The shoot-em-up (smartly shortened to shmup) emerged in the 60s as a subgenre of the shooter category, with Steve Russell?s Spacewar! being the first introduction of the intense and oftentimes adrenaline-intoxicating gameplay we?ve come to know of the subgenre. In the early 90s, we saw a niche of games, affectionately called ?bullet hells? or ?manic shooters,? take the shmup to the extremely literal definition of ?shoot them up.? These bullet hell games?called so because of the jarring and overwhelming amount of projectiles on screen at any given time?have helped game studios like Housemarque, developers of 1996?s Super Stardust and 2013?s Resogun, survive for nearly three decades. While surviving on the conviction of perfecting a subgenre may work for Housemarque, it doesn?t seem to work for Pixel Perfex. The studio?s Earth Atlantis wants so desperately to be a bullet hell that it forgets the core of the genre: exhilaration, stimulation, and tension. Earth Atlantis is none of these; it has none of these. Earth Atlantis is mere bullet hell tedium ad nauseam, an exercise in boredom and repetition and little else. Worse Repetition Than Groundhog Day
Devastated by ?The Great Climate Shift,? 96 percent of the Earth?s surface is underwater. As if matters weren?t bad enough in this cataclysmic situation, machines that have adopted the form of marine animals have begun terrorizing what remains of human civilization. You are a ?Hunter? piloting a submarine, sent to exterminate the...