Virtual Boy Complete - Game #17
Vertical Force is just kind of a normal game. It's hard to talk about a game with basically nothing special to it, it's a vertical shooter, you collect overwriting powerups that increase your power or range, and there's a plane swapping gimmick where you can go up or down.
The plane swapping gimmick is cool on paper, but in practice just serves as more an unreliable dodge button, since half of the time only one half is inhabited by enemies. There are cool things done with it, like whirlpools that take you to the bottom layer on a sand level and the game opening by letting you choose between a powerful or wide gun, but the "meh" outweighs the good to this, and there's also a bit of outright bad design to this - there are walls littered throughout these stages, often times these can be passed over from above but not from the bottom - however, these are often placed quite awkwardly - at one point I got crushed into the bottom of the screen by going into a set of two walls, without knowing there was another wall at the top. The most egregious was in the sand level, where there's floor on the upper layer held up by columns on the bottom layer - the columns did not fill out the whole layer, so I believed that going under would be a place to shield from bombs - however, I took damage even though I did not touch the columns, yet still went through, and then recieved an extra point of damage once my I-frames were over. These bad design elements were relatively few from what I played, but still are egregious enough to drop it a bit.
Another thing I need to mention are the mini-ships. There's a power-up that summons a tiny little ship controlled by the CPU and assists you. This thing is overpowered as hell and breaks the game in half. I don't believe it's any weaker than you, but it's certainly faster in both shooting and movement, it's certainly less durable but that barely changes anything.
Vertical Force is just kind of a normal game. It's hard to talk about a game with basically nothing special to it, it's a vertical shooter, you collect overwriting powerups that increase your power or range, and there's a plane swapping gimmick where you can go up or down.
The plane swapping gimmick is cool on paper, but in practice just serves as more an unreliable dodge button, since half of the time only one half is inhabited by enemies. There are cool things done with it, like whirlpools that take you to the bottom layer on a sand level and the game opening by letting you choose between a powerful or wide gun, but the "meh" outweighs the good to this, and there's also a bit of outright bad design to this - there are walls littered throughout these stages, often times these can be passed over from above but not from the bottom - however, these are often placed quite awkwardly - at one point I got crushed into the bottom of the screen by going into a set of two walls, without knowing there was another wall at the top. The most egregious was in the sand level, where there's floor on the upper layer held up by columns on the bottom layer - the columns did not fill out the whole layer, so I believed that going under would be a place to shield from bombs - however, I took damage even though I did not touch the columns, yet still went through, and then recieved an extra point of damage once my I-frames were over. These bad design elements were relatively few from what I played, but still are egregious enough to drop it a bit.
Another thing I need to mention are the mini-ships. There's a power-up that summons a tiny little ship controlled by the CPU and assists you. This thing is overpowered as hell and breaks the game in half. I don't believe it's any weaker than you, but it's certainly faster in both shooting and movement, it's certainly less durable but that barely changes anything.