About Polybattle:
This game is F-Zero crossed with Galaga. So buy it. Jeff Minter has been making highly influential and unusual arcade-inspired games since the earliest days of indie development in the early 1980s. Even so, I honestly feel like his best work is his most recent stuff. And that said, Polybius could very well be his greatest game yet. I never expected something like this to become one of my top games of the last decade, but Jeff’s experience with programming and talent for making a truly sensory experience absolutely shines here. Llamasoft’s modern games all use a highly optimised, scratch-built engine of their own and to experience Polybius in 4K or VR makes you wonder how they squash so much magic into such a tiny install. Steer a very fast ship down a variety of surfaces, including flat planes, tunnels, tubes and spirals, shooting stuff. Fly through narrow gates and collect pills to speed up to a ludicrous lick. The faster you travel, the more points you get and the more you extend your ship’s deflector shield, allowing you to survive impacts without losing shields. The better you perform, the more psychedelic the game becomes. This is incredibly overwhelming at first, but as your eyes and reflexes attune to the madness, it creates a sense of real euphoria. There are 50 levels and getting to the end requires some serious skill and commitment, but Polybius includes the trademark Llamasoft ‘restart best’ feature, where your best ever score and number of lives are recorded whenever you finish a level. This means that if you’re stuck on a level without enough shields, you can go back a few and perform better to set a new restart best for the level you’re stuck on. It’s a forgiving system that’s genius in its simplicity. There are also Pure (start at level one with a final score recorded at game over) and YOLO (start at level one with 9 shields but no ability to gain more) modes available. And of course, there’s a killer trance/techno soundtrack which is just mega.
