An Inventive Shoot ’Em Up Whose Inventions Don’t Always Work
I’m not sure that there has been a shoot ’em up that has looked like Wings of Beyond. To me, it’s a shootout in a kid’s sticker book. Every enemy feels like you could scratch at its edge with a nail and peel it off. The colours are bold and primary, the lines are drawn with thick black markers. I’m still on the fence about whether I actually like this sticker-book aesthetic, but you can’t accuse Wings of Beyond of doing what everyone else is doing.
It’s a sentiment that stretches to all of Wings of Beyond. This is not your traditional shoot ’em up. You’re not working your way through a level, encountering a miniboss before a bigger boss. You’re not building your ship up incrementally, powering up weapons and conserving smart-bombs for the big-boss. You’re not choosing your starting ship based on a variety of different stats. Wings of Beyond gets its inspirations from games other than shoot ’em ups.
Think Space Invaders, But Mapped To The Level Layout Of Starfox
In Wings of Beyond you have thirty levels. You need to complete one to unlock the next, and the vast majority of them are enemies, not bosses. Those enemies arrive in waves, and Wings of Beyond begins to resemble a tower-defense in shoot ’em up’s clothing. Your job is to stop the ships from passing you on their journey to the bottom of the screen, but you can still let the odd few go. While defense is your objective, the enemies damage your high-score, not your ship, when they nip through your defences.
In a bit of a controversial move, you start each of these 30 levels with no power ups at all. You don’t keep a single thing from the level that came before, so you’re naked except for a slow-moving ship and a weapon that seemingly doesn’t want to fire at all. It sulkily pew-pews at the enemy with a fire-rate that we will charitably label ‘abysmal’. You are painfully bad when you start each level.
After killing a few enemies, those same enemies begin to drop power-ups. You can drag your ship over to gain increased fire-rate, increased ship-speed, extra health pips and more. Your ship might even start to feel playable: you can actually move out of the way of incoming enemies and kill a few of them, too. Power-ups become more frequent, and you might even unlock a new weapon. You start to out-perform the squids, meteors and bombs that fall towards you.
Please, Please Don’t Take My Powers Away
That’s two huge calls. Not only are you resetting your ship with each level, the reset makes your ship feel terrible. They’re big calls, but – in my view – they’re the wrong ones. Too much of Wings of Beyond is spent playing catch up, feeling like you can barely deal with the most pathetic enemy. And too little of Wings of Beyond is spent feeling like a badass, capitalising on accrued power, speed and health. I felt like I was constantly working for that single minute of joy, where I would finally be strong enough to do damage.
What the reset-every-level does mean, though, is that the designers can treat each level as a puzzle to be solved. They know how strong you are going to be, they know what power levels you can achieve, and they can design their levels around that understanding. Levels become a rush to stay relevant, as you try to stay ahead of the difficulty curve. Other levels lean on the diverse cast of enemies to create waves that are puzzles themselves. One level has you navigating a maze of mines, while another has the enemies reversing onto the game screen from the bottom. It requires a real change of thinking.
This is what I like most about Wings of Beyond. It uses every last tool at its disposal to make the experience varied. A level might have limited power-ups, requiring you to eke out a victory. Another will give you too many, throwing hordes of enemies at you.
Unique, But Without Some Of The Base Expectations Of A Shmup
I’d have liked more from the weapons, spaceships and bosses, if you can call them that. The weapons are all riffs on the same theme: you can have one that fires two bullets, another that fires three, and one – get ready for it – that fires loads, like a shotgun. The more bullets the weapon fires, the less powerful it is and the longer it takes to reload, so they’re all boringly balanced against each other. I found myself pining for a laser, bouncing balls, homing missiles, flamethrowers – anything.
You can choose different starting ships but the differences are purely aesthetic. There’s no difference in starting speed or power: they are all equally bad. And bosses turn up periodically, flashing up warnings and getting your hopes up. But they are mostly over-sized versions of standard enemies, and they have no unique mechanics to make them stand out.
The result is a game that has odd focuses, and they’re not focuses we would have necessarily chosen if we were making Wings of Beyond. It prioritises enemies – which it has a decent cast to choose from – and the composition of its waves. The levels are either puzzles to solve, or waves to survive.
A Shoot ’Em Up That Seems Reluctant To Let You Kill Things
What it neglects is pretty much everything else, really. There are no game modes or ships to unlock. The weapons are ostensibly the same, and the power-ups tinker with speed, fire-rate and health, rather than the weapon effects themselves. There are no highscores, real boss encounters or scripted moments.
The damage that this does is to variety and feelings of power. Wings of Beyond tries its damnedest to make each level feel different, but when the challenge is the same on every one – to gain enough power-ups to be competitive – they start to echo each other. And starting that power-journey afresh on every level rarely makes you feel like a gaming god. Most of the time, we felt like a gaming peasant, just trying to keep up.
I came away from Wings of Beyond thinking that it was brave in trying to reinvent the shoot ’em up wheel. But as the old adage goes, sometimes that wheel doesn’t need reinventing. Wings of Beyond was too sluggish and samey, avoiding some of the pure joys that should come as standard to a shooter.
Important Links
Wings of Beyond Takes The Fight To The Galaxy – https://www.thexboxhub.com/wings-of-beyond-takes-the-fight-to-the-galaxy/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/wings-of-beyond-xbox-series/9pdhh8cq52hb
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/wings-of-beyond-xbox-one/9nqkbtfm6mzf
Buy a Windows PC version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/wings-of-beyond-windows/9pl27qss0vb4
