Rapidfyre

Y'know, I like my computer.  I like it a lot, but nobody's perfect.  Every computer has its flaws.  My computer has a 700GB hard drive.  That might seem like a lot, but games tend to be huge files, and I set out to play 500 of them, not counting the non-DigiPen titles I depend on to keep me sane.  So now, we're not even 2/3 done with the year and I've only got 130GB left on my drive.  Mercifully, the DigiPen games tend to be pretty small.  The largest one I've encountered was Crazy Cross, and that wasn't even half a gig.

Enter Rapidfyre.  Things were off to a bad start when I saw that the application file alone was 500MB, and the whole package was more than 800.  After sighing and saying goodbye to another gigabyte of storage space, the game wouldn't start.  "Oh no," I said, "I've sacrificed too much to declare this a broken game."  I decided to do a bit of research; then I found out that Rapidfyre is a mod of the Alien Swarm SDK, meaning I had to go download Alien Swarm, a 2GB file, as well.  So in total, that's 3 entire gigabytes of space.  That could comfortably fit 6 Crazy Crosses!

So yes, I am a bit biased from the get-go, but come on, 3 gigabytes?  The game isn't even that long.  I got through it in less than 40 minutes.  40 minutes!  Crazy Cross took me almost a week of casual play, and that game was entirely original.

Oh yeah, that's another point of bias for me.  I absolutely loathe mods, remakes, or pretty much anything that can be construed as lazy.  I've never modded a game before (unless you count texture swapping in GTA: Vice City), so I don't know how much effort went into making this game, but I can't give it credit for looking and feeling nice, because that was the work of the Alien Swarm guys.

And once you take that into consideration, there are really only 2 things to judge Rapidfyre for: the dual-color mechanic and the enemy design.  Both of these things are pretty well done, but I can't help but wonder how many times the guys at DigiPen are going to try and sell me Ikaruga in a different package.  I feel like that time I was like 8 years old and I told all my friends and family that I wanted a new video game for Christmas, and literally everyone who got me a present decided on Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg.  It's a great game, as is Ikaruga, but I can only play a game so many times before I get bored.

The final boss is well constructed, as are the rest of the enemies, but hot damn they are easy to take down, especially when you're given th-th-thirty lives?!? What?!  5 lives would've been fine, 10 would have been generous, but 30?!  How inept do the developers think we are at playing these games?  A simple design flaw like that can really sap the tension and excitement away from what is otherwise a very tense and exciting final boss fight.

So yeah, final verdict: Rapidfyre was fun but mindless, a welcome departure from Alien Swarm's unforgiving difficulty, but the concept is unoriginal and the gameplay doesn't deserve a much better adjective than "solid."  If you've got 3GB to spare and you were holding out until now for a truly polished game to waste time with, go nuts.  Otherwise, don't bother.

That's all I got for now.  Until next time, stay absorbent.

Links
liberal use of "y" does not make you cool: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24912