Review: PixelJunk Shooter 2

The original PixelJunk Shooter is a game of details. It had wonderfully intricate interactions between different earthly elements, the game world and the ultimate goal to save survivors. PixelJunk Shooter 2 attempts to continue this on, adding a few more elements, new enemy types, suits and a general design philosophy of “more”. With this, Q-Games have seem to forgotten that calling the original game “Shooter” was a bit of a misnomer.

PixelJunk Shooter 2 (PS3)
Developer: Q-Games
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Release date: March 1, 2011

Shooter 2’s focus is shifted, from element puzzles to Shoot 'em up oriented design. The level design at large is more about the rote defeat of enemies than how to manipulate the elements. When there are elements to manipulate, they are frequently posed as obstacles to avoid rather than a puzzle piece to place. The main exception being the new element of light, which does have a few clever levels.

Shooter design also seeps into the bosses. Both the second and the final (third) bosses are directly derived from the basic tropes of the genre: dodging bullet patterns and shooting weak spots when exposed. The ship movement, based on physics with inertia, fails to hold up to the scrutiny that the moderately complex bullet patterns impose. It makes the bosses and a few level sections unduly hard and breaks any kind of flow. With no checkpoints in between the multiple stages of the bosses either, frustration is only compounded further.

The presentation of Shooter 2 remains excellent, with a chunkily stylized aesthetic and the oddly fitting, turntable-heavy hip hop from High Frequency Bandwidth. The moralistic underpinnings of the mining theme can be a little awkward and overbearing at times, especially when, quite literally, a tear from a defeated enemy falls into magma and sizzles away. The game can also be heavy-handed in its attempt to appropriate various 1980s era games, lifting components too directly from Boulder Dash and Galaga.

When PixelJunk Shooter had it’s original naming contest, Elements seemed like the obvious choice. The elements were the most interesting and original parts of the design. PixelJunk Shooter 2 makes sense of the “Shooter” in its name but disappointingly so.

Score: 49%