Astromenace
Version: 1.4 Web: https://viewizard.comx
Astromenace has been absent from the news since its last major release in 2012, so while we’ve been secretly enjoying this stunning 3D space shooter, the game’s been too outdated to enter HotPicks. Now we have the long-awaited version 1.4 and that’s a good reason to take this game for another spin. Astromenace is a single-player OpenGL game where you drive a futuristic spacecraft, shooting endless fleets of enemy ships. The gaming process looks like vertical scrolling, usually with a sphere of your home planet in the background. You have a wide choice of ship models as well as a lot of weaponry, including machine guns, laser cannons, plasma ball launchers, rockets and more. Destroying a target bags you points, which you can then spend on upgrading the armour, chassis, engine, etc. So, every kill you clock earns you some money, and after a couple of missions, you will face a trade-off of what to upgrade first: the ship itself (more protection, better weapon slots) or weapons (more attack power, more scored points). The strategy is up to you, but whatever it is, the game always lets you replay any level with unlimited attempts. The level design is close to perfection, the difficulty level grows gradually and enemy ships become more intelligent and cunning. Your goals also become more varied, from avoiding large asteroids to shooting down surface-to-air launchers before they fire their missiles. Astromenace has a massive set of levels, and it is unlikely that you will complete them all in just a few hours. The game keeps you enthralled with shiny graphics and a pumping soundtrack along with voice notifications – all of which fit the game’s atmosphere perfectly.
The quality of graphics is impressive, so much so that the game can lag on lower-end PCs. Still, it is possible to lower some video parameters and play Astromenace smoothly even with integrated graphics. Astromenace1.4 automatically detects your language and feels snappier, too, thanks to it moving from SDL to SDL2 and with some 1,300 fixes in the code.