Moose Life
Jeff Minter’s latest psychedelic shooter has snuck onto Steam, and it’s every bit as good as you’d expect from the shoot-’em-up maestro who has been honing his craft since the early Eighties. Moose Life offers numerous ungulates, trippy visuals, a pulsing soundtrack you can almost feel and tight, precise controls that enable you to simply focus on destroying as many enemies as possible. It’s also absolutely brilliant.
Mechanically, Moose Life is suitably different to recent Llamasoft shooters, such as Tempest 4000 and Polybius, and is a great counterargument to the claims that all the two-man studio focuses on is subtle variations of the same Atari classics. Moose Life, like many Llamasoft titles appears to be an extremely simple game on its retrowave surface, but the longer you play, the deeper you realise it is. Each level in Moose Life contains a set amount of enemies and you can’t progress until you’ve defeated them all. What’s neat here, though, is that you can move forwards and backwards through each looped stage, effectively meaning you can play Moose Life at your own speed.
Another neat touch is jumping. Granted, it’s nothing new in Llamasoft games, but here it lets you cling to ceilings so you can deal with enemies that are literally on another level to you. Needless to say, as Moose Life’s stages intensify, you’ll find yourself frantically hopping from ceiling to floor and back again as you weave past bullets and try and grab each power-up that comes your way. You’ll want to grab those little pills, too, as they offer all sorts of useful bonuses, including rapid fire, handy drones and even the ability to turn enemies into harmless deer. They stack, too, meaning things get crazy, very quickly.
Moose Life is fast, frantic and full of fun (we love the sampled shouts of ‘excellent’ when you set a high score). It’s arguably the best Llamasoft shooter we’ve played for ages, and when you consider the competition that’s high praise indeed.
>> Score 94%