Debris Infinity

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Title: Debris Infinity
Developer: SVC Games
Publisher: SVC Games
Website: http://www.svcgames.com/debris-infinity/
Genre: Shooter, Action, Arcade
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Audience: 3
Release Date: 25/09/18
Price: £4.49 – Rapid Reviews UK was very kindly provided with a review code for this title.

What the Developers say

Debris Infinity is an action packed game that puts your reflexes to the limit, allowing you to manipulate time itself to make impossible maneuvers, using an advance scoring system to rank your performance!

With 3 different single-player game modes you can test your skills in exciting scenarios: Fight against the clock in Time Attack, plan you attacks with precision in Power Wave or survive to earn the highest score in Normal mode.

Bring along a friend and enjoy the cooperative gameplay in all game modes, where one player act as the pilot and the other as the gunner: Synchronization is key!

Or fight in Versus Mode, where you can use enemies as weapons or bait, to confuse and defeat the other player!

Test and improve your skills in the pulse-pounding experience of Debris Infinity!

Introduction

Debris Infinity is a simple game, but it’s by no means an easy game. Taking is cues from classics such as Asteroids and the incredible Geometry Wars on Xbox 360, it’s easy to pick up but challenging to master. Bright colours, big explosions and the constant niggle of “just one more go” drew me to play this a lot during this extended review period. But whats the package like overall? Read on to find out!

Looks and Sounds

Debris Infinity looks like Asteroids but plays like Geometry Wars. Bright neon colours illuminate the arena, and there is a nice variety of enemies to contend with. Basic asteroid shapes, little pinwheels, big retro-looking robots and vast swarms of bright pink beasties among others will slowly fill the battlefield until there’s not much room to move. It’s basic line drawings, and your little ship can easily get lost in the madness but that’s half the fun.

Particle effects spray from every enemy as they explode and the various brightly coloured weapons you and the enemies wield, make the place look like a fever dream. Despite the basic nature, it’s a lovely looking little game. The HUD is nice and neat, and all the information you need is conveyed even though things aren’t necessarily well labelled.

Gameplay and Replayability

The gameplay is as simple as the graphics but again, the fact its uncomplicated makes this an even more engaging game. You move your little ship with the left stick, and you shoot in the direction you point with the right stick. There’s a bomb on ZR, and the one new addition to this type of game is a slow-motion ability you can activate with ZL if you want to get out of a sticky situation.

The bomb and slow-motion are stored on an energy meter so uses are finite, but the meter can be filled by one of the various enemy loot drops. It’s also not a one-shot death situation – you also have a health bar which gets slowly chipped away with every enemy hit. It’s a nice new twist on an age-old formula, and it gives you a bit of a chance to live another day unless you get caught by a swarm or one of a few super weapons that the enemies possess. However, it also means you only have one life in standard mode. More on the other modes later.

As was mentioned before, there’s a variety of enemies to deal with. Some take one hit, others need to have a concentration of fire to bring them down. Others that play like mini-bosses take a bit of a beating and avoiding their death rays as well as the multitude of enemies on screen can become taxing. To motivate you further and to make those numbers go up faster, there are a few other systems to contend with.

A combo meter builds up with every enemy kill if you keep killing things it keeps climbing and you get a boost to your points. This also means you get weapon improvements. They’re hardly new inventions what with a spread weapon and the rapid-firing machine gun/laser type thing, but they do the job and blowing this up is always satisfying. And that’s it, move, kill, die, repeat for a better score.

There are three game modes on offer here – a standard mode which is a race to the top of the leaderboard. One life, constantly spawning waves of enemies and see how long you can survive. There’s a time attack mode which once again sees you chasing the top of the leaderboard but with a strict time limit. Power mode sees you given another bar to manage with every kill keeping the bar filled. Again, once this runs out its game over, there’s also a versus mode which I didn’t get to try, but I can only assume it’s more of the same again. No bad thing, but hardly deep.

Going for those high scores is the only motivation you have to keep going with Debris Infinity. If you have good sized friends list then its always fun to push yourself to loftier positions so you can lord it over them but there’s already an abundance of insane scores that will likely keep you out of the top 10 for a long time to come.

The biggest issue I had with Debris Infinity was that it likes to drop random spawns on your position to keep you moving. This was an issue with Geometry Wars as well and leads you to make some poor decisions to get out of a bad situation. If you don’t, you’re likely to take more damage than if you’d just flown right into the side of the nearest asteroid. It can get cluttered quickly, and there’s more than enough enemies who will seek you out and murder you where you stand. Performance is solid though, even in handheld mode, with no noticeable dips in performance, also when things get hectic.

Conclusion

Debris Infinity is the game I didn’t realise I needed right now. An excellent brain off, blast stuff and repeat ad nauseam type affair that has been an excellent palate cleanser. It borrows from all the right places and does it well. Yes it’s not a new concept, and we’ll likely see a million more twin-stick shooters like it in our lifetime, but it does what it set out to do. If you can deal with massive explosions, bright flashing colours and the occasional bout of frustration as you die at the hands of an enemy who wasn’t there two seconds ago, then you’ll love Debris Infinity. With no new Geometry Wars on the horizon, this is one that I will be playing whenever I have five minutes. Just be warned, if you do have photosensitive epilepsy, this is one to avoid.

Rapid Reviews UK Rating

You can purchase Debris Infinity on the Nintendo eShop at the following link,
https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Debris-Infinity-1447140.html