ZOE Begone! – PS5 Review

ZOE Begone! is a shoot ’em up that’s about as far away from a traditional shooter as you can get.  Forget your militaristic skirmishes or epic space battles, because this game comes from Retchy (Graeme Hawkins), a solo dev/animator from Scotland and he’s not looking to make the next R-Type or 1942.  Instead, this game speaks directly to his own artistry and sees you playing as a green blob that’s trying to get some rest albeit while trapped on a film reel and under siege by the animator who created her.

Okay, that’s an odd premise for a game but when you dig into the gameplay this shoot ’em up borrows mainly from the Williams 1981 coin-op Defender.  So, instead of the usual uni-directional scroll of most horizontally-skewed shooters, here you get a two-way scroll on a looping playfield.  Think Resogun and if you’ve not played Resogun, stop reading and go and download it.  For our money it’s still one of the best games to ever grace the PS4.

A quick tutorial explains the main gameplay mechanics and you’ll need to pay attention to it because ZOE isn’t as intuitive as other shooters.  When flying about, your right stick can be used to aim and fire (yay!  No separate fire button!) either left or right.  So you’ll fly in either direction and shoot at any threats.  Kill them and they’ll drop an apple and that can be collected and used as currency to buy upgrades in the shop that appears between levels.

However, you can also land on the floor and your weapon can then be fired in five directions (left, right, up and the two diagonals between).  So far, so simple.  But the issue is that your gun isn’t all that powerful, your enemies are fast and durable and there’s not a ton of screen space to work in.  And so you’ll want to use your other form of attack which is a dash move.  Pressing either shoulder button, while in the air, launches you forward.  This can be used to barrel through multiple enemies, taking them all out in a nice chain.

A dash also gives you a little bit of invincibility and so is a good way to get out of a sticky situation.  But it has a limitation.  After a few collisions with enemies, you’ll run out of energy and so to keep not only dashing but also flying, you’ll need to get a recharge.  To do this you need to ground slam (either trigger button) over a pellet and that’ll fill up your health.  But it’ll also take that pellet out of play, so don’t get too greedy refilling your lost energy too often.

In theory this is all fine.  Shoot, dash, slam, recharge.  Got it.  But in execution, it can all be quite tricky.  The ‘pro tips’ section recommends chaining dashes and slams and that actually works quite well but leaves you feeling like you’re not really in control.  Unlike other shooters, the enemies are too quick, too random and so all you can really do is attack full-on in an effort to survive and that is fine until about mid-way through the game where suddenly the difficulty goes over the top and the whole thing starts to feel a bit unplayable.

We’ve gone back to the opening levels many times, experimenting with tactics to improve and it never really seems to help with that tricky third set of levels (there are five overall).  It just strikes us as not all that well playtested which was evident in the pre-release build when the slam mechanic didn’t work properly, making the game literally unplayable.  Now, fair enough, they fixed that the very next day but it shouldn’t have taken for us to mention it.  And while the game is playable now, the difficulty curve just feels completely off.

For a game that focuses a lot on scores and multipliers, this level of difficulty just means that you’re fighting for survival rather than for improved scores.  We always think back to Omega Five on the Xbox 360.  Sure, it’s a game lost to history but it made completion pretty easy but putting together a leaderboard topping score took a lot more skill and strategy.  That’s what we want.  Not just a punishing shoot ’em up with a scoring mechanic attached.

Part of the difficulty comes from the game’s visual style too.  Given the dev’s artistic background, you expect a degree of flourish and experimentation and, yeah, the game’s quirky setting is kind of neat but the UI is a mess.  We’re never sure how much energy or health we’ve got.  It’s certainly not all that readable at first glance in the heat of battle and enemies pop into view seemingly out of nowhere so you can really plan your chains.  Indeed, even the original Defender had a mini-map that showed you what was going on and that’d be great here for combo-building. But instead we get a triangle and some coloured blobs on that energy/health meter and it’s all basically useless.  And besides, you’ll die (or at least lose your combo) in the time it takes to read it properly.

And, here’s the thing, the visuals aren’t even all that good.  The art style is colourful and chunky but not at all detailed.  For a lot of the time you’re just fighting dots, circles, dashes and squiggles.  When you think about what Geometry Wars did with simple shapes, it makes ZOE look pretty basic with it’s PSP-era visual style.  And while the jazzy soundtrack tries to sell the quirky cuteness of it all, we never really bought into it.

In the end, ZOE Begone! has left us frustrated.  Not just with its difficulty but with the way it all hangs together.  The slow, unrewarding upgrade system, the simplistic but cluttered visuals, the awkward controls.  Nothing here feels optimised or really tested by regular gamers and as such it all just feels like an interesting, but flawed, experiment.