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Tag: top-down shooter

  • Shadowgrounds: Survivor: Top down alien shooting, Now with Physics!

    Shadowgrounds: Survivor: Top down alien shooting, Now with Physics!

    Way back in 2016 I wrote about Shadowgrounds, a top-down horror shooter by Frozenbyte, the developers of the Trine franchise. I thought it was a neat little game for what it was, and while it wasn’t super unique, it was at least a bit of fun for a few hours. Towards the end of the article I wrote:

    One day I’ll get around to the sequel, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, which might be more of the same, but I don’t see that as a bad thing.

    Then I mostly forgot about it. The original Shadowgrounds was a fun little romp for what it was, and I guess I felt I needed some time before I jumped right in. It wasn’t until almost a decade later would I actually get around to playing it. It wasn’t quite worth the wait.

    Wouldn’t be a 2000s video game without a cute lady on the title screen.

    Developed again by Frozenbyte and published by Meridian4, Shadowgrounds: Survivor is basically a standalone expansion pack to the original game. This was released one year after the original Shadowgrounds, and since Frozenbyte wasn’t a super big developer at the time, this felt a bit more like a tech demo than anything resembling a sequel.

    Taking place concurrently with events from the original game, you play as three characters: Luke “Marine” Giffords, a generic soldier; Bruno “Napalm” Lastmann, a Russian drunken soldier stereotype; and Isabel “Sniper” Larose, a cute goth assassin lady. During the story you switch between these characters as they all get a message from McTiernan, a scientist who is trying to help fix a base in New Atlantis to cull the impending alien threat.

    Why is there always sewers……

    Like its predecessor, Shadowgrounds: Survivor is a top down action game. Each character has a unique set of weapons they use and procure throughout their journey to kill the alien threat, which is the general gamut of pistols, assault rifles, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and railguns.

    All the major arsenal from Shadowgrounds reappears here, but this time locked to specific characters. Marine only gets a pistol to start, but eventually picks up the legally-distinct-from-Alien Pulse Rifle. Napalm starts with a flamethrower, natch, but can get a shotgun. Sniper naturally has a special handgun but later picks up a railgun. Each character also has grenades they can throw at any time, as well as a tactical dodge to avoid gunfire.

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  • Shadowgrounds: A fun little top-down action game.

    Shadowgrounds: A fun little top-down action game.

    If you’re like me, you probably have a massive backlog of games. It’s not surprising, Steam sales have become the bane of our existence. In my case, I sometimes buy games and wonder why I bought them, like Chrome. I almost wrote something about that game, but I kept dying even on easy, so I bailed out of playing that one.

    This is just a small excerpt of some of the games I’ve bought on countless Steam sales and never played or finished.

    So let’s see what else I got. It’s a bit early in the year to write about Amnesia: The Dark Descent, stuff like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim has been done to death, and I don’t think there’s interest in me writing about the Telltale Wallace & Gromit games…

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    “Doom 3 meets Smash TV” is quite an unusual boxquote.

    Here we go. Shadowgrounds, a game from Frozenbyte, a Finnish developer who’d later be known for the Trine series of games. This was one of their earlier efforts, and holds a bit of a memory for me. We have to go back to the far-flung past of 2006 to explain this story.

    While Steam is an absolute juggernaut and considered the gold standard of PC digital distribution now, back in 2006 Steam was a much different beast. Besides Valve’s own titles, there wasn’t much third party support for the storefront, outside of a few indie games like the wonderful Darwinia and the one-note forgettable Rag Doll Kung Fu.

    Frozenbyte’s Shadowgrounds was one of those early adopters of Valve’s content delivery service, and while it probably wasn’t a breakout hit, I remember it being one of those standout games during Steam’s early years. Considering this was during the transition period for PC gaming where games were still sold in physical boxes in stores, this was probably a better place for the game than being stuck in a bargain rack at a GameStop.

    I bought this along with its sequel, Shadowgrounds: Survivor during a Steam summer sale. I was familiar with the game through a demo, but I figure the full game was probably worth a try. It being $1.24 during a Steam summer sale probably helped too, as I’m a sucker for impulse-buying games for super cheap.

    You play as engineer William Tyler, who is sent to the moon Ganymede to do some routine generator repair. As expected in fiction like this, stuff goes wrong and aliens begin to invade. Armed with only a pistol, Tyler must fight loads of aliens as he fights for his life while trying to find out the mystery of this invasion. Along the way you meet people that try to help you make sense of this mess.

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    Even for a top-down shooter, this game has pretty good level complexity.

    Shadowgrounds is a top-down shooter. It reminds me of Valve’s Alien Swarm, though European readers may liken this more to Team17’s Alien Breed series of games. The game is fairly straightforward: Shoot the aliens before they attack you and kill you.

    A lot of the arsenal is fairly commonplace stuff for these kind of action games: You start with a pistol, then later get an assault rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher, stuff like that. The only unique weapons on display is a laser rifle, a longer-range railgun and an electric zapper weapon towards the end of the game.

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    You can’t tell in the screenshot, but the character’s head-in-a-box has a moving mouth, but not their in-game version. Looks kinda weird to me.

    Throughout the game there’s a lot of PDAs and computers that explain the shady dealings that this military base does, which is kinda cool. While this does give some Doom 3 vibes, it at least seems more interesting especially when one of the PDAs is a small gag about a chef’s love for meatballs.

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