Habroxia review

As an unnamed protagonist, players will pilot the Habroxia ship across 15 levels where you’ll have to take on an army of alien threat, survive intense boss battles and rescue lost pilots whose ships didn’t make it through the battle.

Habroxia is a shmup where you have to reach the end of each level by taking out every enemy in your path. Once reaching the end of the level, you’ll be tasked with destroying a boss; it follows the typical shmup formula, so on the surface, there’s nothing drastically different.

Where it stands out from typical shmup is that right out the gate, there are three different firing patterns: you can shoot straight forward, above and below you and a spread-like attack. It does give you a bit of help especially when you’re squeezed between enemies constantly flying above or below you. Another interesting aspect is that some levels will transition from side-scrolling shmup to overhead view. It brings a bit of variety to a typical straight forward experience.

While you’d think that it’d be better to use the spread attack all throughout the game, you’d be wrong. While efficient because you can cover a bit more air with your projectiles, the spread attack feels underpowered compared to either single shots. Enemies take can sustain a lot of damage so using the spread gun will make killing enemies even longer; sometimes they’ll have time to fly by.

Additionally, your ship has a shield so is basically your health bar; so don’t need to worry about one-hit deaths. While your shield gets depleted when getting hit, you’ll be able to recover some health with Heart pick-ups. You can also pick up additional firepower which can be used with your alternate attack button. Destroyed ships will also drop credits which are a currency that can be used to upgrade your ship (attacks, health, etc…) in between missions.

As you progress through the game and clear levels, you’ll also unlock additional game modes such as Invasion Mode (think Horde mode) and Save the Astronauts; it makes for an interesting addition, but won’t really get you addicted. Another inconsistency, while the spreadshot feels useless in the story mode, it becomes useful and competent in Invasion mode.

Habroxia’s presentation feels flat and a NES era throwaway game. You move at a very slow paced while your enemies fly at more respectable speed. The game has a limited enemy design; rehashing the same design with different color patterns. The soundtrack sounds like a bad, read very bad, NES stock soundtrack; sounds like it was created for a very early NES game where sound designers didn’t know how far/good it could go/become.

Habroxia feels boring and tedious. It’s a shump where you’re tasked to killing all enemies but given how many hits they take, most of them will fly by instead of being turned into space trash. While I did enjoy the upgrade flexibility of buying/selling upgrades, but the slow pace, nearly unkillable enemies and highly underwhelming boss battles makes this an easy pass given the quality of other recent shmups.