Review: JoyJoy (Xbox Live Indie)
I’m a HUGE fan of Geometry Wars. It was one of the primary reasons I actually bought an Xbox 360 (alongside Pac-Man: Championship Edition). Since the game’s popularity brought about such a surge of twin-stick shooters, I’ve always been a little tough on judging them based on how flawlessly executed Geometry Wars was (and only to be truly surpassed by its sequel). JoyJoy is a similar styled game for Xbox Live Indie Games, once that sets itself apart with a unique visual style, rock solid gameplay and a killer price.
JoyJoy has twenty-four levels and every fourth level is a swarm level, where you have to fight off a massive swarm of popcorn enemies. Every eighth level is a boss level, which shouldn’t need further explanation. You’ll eventually have six different weapons which mostly differ in speed, spread and range although there are a couple of specialty weapons, such as a homing shot and one that reflects off of walls. You have no bombs but you can charge up a shot that will have varying effects depending on the base weapon used. After dispatching so many enemies, you’ll activate “Star Power,” which gives you a temporary boost of speed and rapid fire.
Each level you’ll also pick up a random power-up or two. Most of these will be weapon power-ups but there are also other bonuses such as faster charge shots, added speed or extra shield hits. There are also two items can pop up which have immediate effects, a Burst item which fires shots are all enemies on the screen or a Vortex item which sucks up all the enemies on the screen into one spot and swirls them around for easy dispatching.
The visuals of the game are really simple yet really great while setting itself apart from the vector style graphics of Geometry Wars and some of its copycats. Each set of levels maintains a very smooth two-tone color scheme, which is very pleasing to the eyes (especially the pink level, of course). The music is functional, yet maybe unmemorable set of trance style electronic tunes.
Ultimately, JoyJoy manages to be a very solid merging of the level-based and endless-based twin stick shooters. However, because of the limited level structure and the lack of a real scoring mechanic (there no chain or combo bonuses that would vary your score between play sessions), JoyJoy’s real hit in terms of the genre is a lack of a solid replay factor. There are five standard difficulty levels, two bonus difficulty levels and six time-based challenge levels, so there’s more than a few ways to vary up your experience, but it only takes it so far, especially without any kind of leaderboards.
