Retro/Grade is a rhythm game designed to appear like a Shoot ’em Up played in reverse. You will be retrieving bullets and missiles that you have fired, missing these will cause the time-line to become damaged and missing enough of them will result in a game over. It is a neat idea and you will definitely want to check out the tutorial before playing. However, it is terrible at introducing you to game’s mechanics as they will throw them all at you at a rapid pace before you get your bearings. It is a pretty difficult game to get the hang of but if you stick with it, it will eventually click. The biggest obstacle to overcome will be the environments themselves, they are filled with clutter and moving objects, making you feel unsure if they are going to crash into you and can also be distracting. Starting the game you will see an option to play Campaign, Challenges, Practice or Tutorial. Contrary to most other games, you will want to start with Challenge mode. Campaign is pretty much the same thing but unlocks nothing.
In Campaign you will play through all 10 songs on whichever of the multiple difficulty levels that you choose. The problem is that the songs while pretty catchy, do start to sound similar and with 130 challenges all playing the same 10 songs you will likely burn out before you unlock any characters or artwork. Challenge mode starts on novice and scales the difficulty the further in you go and occasionally adds small tweaks to the gameplay to spice things up. Compared to merely selecting a difficulty and having to start from the first song every time you want to turn up the difficulty, the difference in the fun factor is huge. In novice mode there are only two different lanes to worry about and the higher the difficulty, the more lanes are added, up to five of them. In these lanes there will also be enemy bullets and running in to them will also mess up the time-line, which is essentially your health bar. You can revert time a bit to rewind to where you messed up and have another shot to do it right as long as you have “fuel” in your spaceship. Fuel is solely used to travel back in time, not an actual necessity to keep your ship flying. It is refilled by hitting a note (retrieving a bullet) that has a whirling energy effect that can contain fuel, a score multiplier or an “Overboard” power-up. Overboard is another way to increase your scores when hitting notes but at the cost of being blinded by colors for a while.
There are three forms of “notes” to collect, bullets which require a single button press and precise timing, rockets where you mash the button until they are all gone and laser beams that require you to hold the button until it is all retrieved. It’s all done with either the spacebar or the A button on the 360 pad. It will result in you just pressing one button over and over again which can get a tad repetitive though pressing it unnecessarily will severely damage your score. Your score goes down depending on how well you do and the main objective is to reach a score of zero on the leader-boards strangely enough. You also start the campaign on the credits screen and make your way back to the the start of the game. It all sounds very weird and creative but in reality it works the same as the levels in any other game since they get progressively harder as you make your way through instead of starting at its hardest. It is explained why in a tongue in cheek way but when it comes down to it, this whole ‘in reverse’ thing is really just a gimmick. A cool idea but still ends up playing very similarly to most rhythm games. The shump aspects are introduced via boss projectiles that you must avoid in certain levels and they do take their sweet time to let you go back to the rhythm parts.
Challenge mode has a cool over-world that has many branching paths and black holes that allow to skip large sections of missions. Reaching an icon of a lock on the over-world through making a path from the levels you cleared will unlock new goodies and the fact that they are so visible makes you want to reach them even more. Unfortunately the challenges themselves get old fast due to how stretched out the 10 song soundtrack is. To counteract this they could have made small unique challenges in certain areas of each song but instead they decided to make you play through the whole song. These songs are not short and will take you the better part of 5 minutes each, making it so that getting that alluring unlockable, you will have to invest a lot of time in songs you have already played to death to clear a path to it. You will be doing that for 130 missions assuming you don’t fail any and have to restart it. If you played the campaign before this then that issue is worsened even more. Truth be told it would have been better if they mixed both the campaign and challenge mode to create a smaller, quality experience instead of a bunch of filler. Retro/Grade is a fun game for a while but stretched itself unbelievably thin, causing it to rapidly feel more like a chore than anything else.
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