More shoot ’em-ups should be educational. We can imagine blowing up cities, only for little pop-ups to tell us about the various architectural styles that we’re destroying. Perhaps a WWII shooter where you can pause and read the story of each soldier that you kill, what rank they held in the war, that sort of thing.
It might sound stupid, but it’s kind of, sort of, where Hexapoda is coming from. It’s a shooter where you’re facing off against insects, and killing each one for the first time creates a little toaster pop-up. You just killed Lithobius Forficatus, did you know that? Pop into the menus, and you can see more about it in the Bestiary. If you’re in the overlap between entomologist and shoot ’em-up fan, then this will be a wet dream.
We might sound facetious, but we’re really not. There are so many shooters that toss waves of identikit spaceships at us, culminating in a yawnsome mech or aircraft carrier. They begin to look the same. Hexapoda’s purely arthropod approach is unique, and – depending on your feelings about the little critters – made us feel a little unsettled and squirmy. Tickle the back of our neck while we were playing and we’d probably leap a few feet off the sofa.
There’s a story to back this up. Gasses make Earth inhospitable and humanity is forced to live underground and offworld. But that puts them in the province of giant bugs, which means a hothead pilot is needed to clear them out. That’s you. You’re put in the care of a scientist, who simultaneously wants the bugs gone and samples of them for testing. Your job is to fight through waves of bugs until you find the queen at the end of each level, jabbing a syringe in them as you go.
It’s the mix of death-dealing and documenting that makes Hexapoda so cute. There’s extra points too for the Metal Gear Solid conversations with your crew, as you chat from the cockpit with a Dr Wily-looking scientist and a female scientist who clearly must be your love interest, because tradition.
If you’ve played a Cave or Psikyo shooter, then you will find the template extremely familiar. Levels scroll upwards and you have free reign to move about the game screen. Waves of enemies turn up and get blasted, before a hulking insectoid behemoth turns up. This is the real game, as suddenly the difficulty gets jacked right up, as bullet hell descends on the screen. You pump as many bullets as you can into the boss before you lose all your lives, and the level is over. An achievement pops, you move onto the next level and the next, until you discover one of the game’s endings.Â
Hexapoda is not long, being six bosses in total, but it’s there to be replayed, like all the best shooters. Paths diverge in the Hive at various points, allowing you to choose whether to fight a giant mantis or scorpion perhaps. A Bestiary demands to be completed, which reminds us – we should get back to that, as we’re only two enemies short. And three different difficulties offer variously skilled players a means of testing themselves.
We’d have taken a map: the branching paths are fine, but we’ve reached a point where we’ve forgotten which ones we’ve taken or not in the past. Hoovering up that bestiary is going to be harder than we think. And the offering is a little too short, in the sense that we never really got a sense of a build and climax. Some levels passed us by, and eventually a credits sequence started up. Over multiple playthroughs, that became accepted, but on the first run it feels somewhat anticlimactic.
Where Hexapoda comes good is the shooting. It’s smooth as peanut butter (the smooth kind). The ship is nimble (although we would have happily taken speed power-ups or a rush mechanic), and the balancing pitch-perfect. Enemies swarm the screen and dump their bullet loads in a way that is just about manageable if you find the gaps and keep the enemy numbers low. Bosses, too, are definitely multipliers on the degree of challenge, but there’s – almost – always a pattern that you can learn and overcome. The exception is the rare boss attack that feels like bullet-noise rather than bullet-hell, and we genuinely couldn’t see a way past them outside of dropping a smart bomb. But they tend to only arrive in the last throes of the boss, so they don’t last long.
But the medal goes to the power-ups. Arkanoid-shaped pods tumble down from the sky, and Hexapoda is not skimpy with them. It loves to shower them on you, and each one is powerful. Pick one up, and your arsenal is overridden by lasers, bouncing bombs and sprays of bullets, but only for a period. After fifteen seconds or so, the gun is gone and you are back to your normal guns. Not that you will be using them for long, before something else gets bolted on.
We soon learned the best ones for us. The W, S and H power ups are pure gold, whatever those letters stand for. We would avoid everything else to pick them up. We might grab a T if we wanted a narrow but damaging space-laser, while B we would avoid like the plague. It would give us a ricocheting bullet that’s arse. Hitting a B felt like a kind of punishment.
If there’s a criticism, it’s that there’s no escalation to these guns. The pick-ups are the same in level 1 as they are in level 6, and they arrive in roughly the same rarity. It means you never get an ‘ooh, grab that!’ moment, as you could almost guarantee that a W, S or H would be around the next corner. They do increase in power if you grab ‘P’ power-ups, but that’s the limit of it.
There’s no persistence between runs, either, which is a modern addition that Hexapoda could have benefited from. There are no upgrades, unlocks or even highscore tables to keep you playing between runs, which means that the achievements and Bestiary have a lot of onus on them. We enjoyed the shooting, and there were just enough branching paths to keep us playing for multiple runs, but we’re genuinely unsure if we will come back for more than that. Saying that, the four-player co-op feature is great, and we can see us returning for large multiplayer sessions.
But hey, we’ve learned a lot of Latin names for arthropods. Hexapoda brings the retro shooter to the insect world, and the result is creepy, polished and a whole lot of fun. It finds the sweetest of sweet spots between difficult and possible, and hands you some ridiculous weapons to blow those sweet spots up. It’s well worth a flutter.
