Aniquilation Review

Developed by R-Next and published by Gamera Game, Aniquilation is as mysterious as its name suggests. It is a futuristic twin-stick shooter which is only a few notches away from being a bullet hell game. Explore different small planets and cause havoc as you try to understand the mysteries of the resource IQ-Metal.

               There is quite a complex storyline afoot with Aniquilation which is not common with twin-stick bullet hell shooters. Your planet has been developing to futuristic new heights thanks to the resource IQ-Metal which is a programmable liquid metal. In short, this resource was overused and their civilisation had run out. Then a certain flash came out of the sky and turned the IQ-Metal into a rusty mess making it useless, causing the civilisation to collapse. So a group of space pilots set out to find more resources to save their civilisation but discover something much worse, or at least that’s my grasp of it as it was all very much confusing and hard to take in as it’s all explained in text.

               You start with a tutorial level to ease you into all of the controls and you get to pick from 4 different Japanese anime style pilots, each with different ship stats – which I am not have much impact in the actual game, so I just pick the one I like the look of. You are instructed on how to shoot, how to use your ship’s sword and how to use your shield. Using the dash and special moves comes in later levels but for a twin-stick shooter, there are a lot of other buttons you need to make use of to progress the levels. I must add although I said the ship’s sword it is more of a reflector attack than a sword.

               Each level is just a small planetoid sphere that you circumnavigate to achieve what the mission is. This could be blowing up all the buildings on the planetoid, surviving waves of enemies, destroying bosses or variations of those. It’s not explained why you need to massacre all these buildings and enemy ships but you just do what you have to do. After you complete each level you get a sort of transition bonus stage which reminds me of the Sonic half-pipe bonus stages. You have to navigate down a circular tunnel picking up IQ-Metal which charges up your special attack between levels. It happens pretty much between each round and stops being fun after the 3^rd time really as it’s just the same thing. You also seem to level up every other stage which is supposed to improve some stats on your ship like resilience or strength but you won’t notice anything different.

               But for a game that calls itself a twin-stick shooter, it focuses so much on the usage of the shield and the reflector sword attack. In most of the levels, you cannot just shoot the buildings to destroy them, you have to lower their shield before you can decimate them. This is done in a variety of different ways. You have to use your sword attack to destroy the shields, you have to deflect ships flying at you and send them into the buildings, you may have to use a special weapon type to bring down the shields or the most annoying way I found is you have to push a glowing ball around the mini planet into a hole/zone to lower the shields. That ball defies physics and logic and moving it around can potentially lead you to despair as constant enemies and environmental hazards try to ruin your day.

               The levels vary in difficulty and they have designed these mini planets to be the most awkward to navigate as there are immovable walls you have to go around. Some levels are just too chaotic with kamikaze ships which do high damage swarming at you whilst navigating around lava on the ground which for some reason also does high damage to your ship. You then also need to find a way to bring the shields down on the buildings before you can destroy them. I found myself on most levels with my shield up bouncing the endless swarm of enemies away with the sword attack which is always fun in a twin-stick shooter. You can find red crystals on the planets which drop a change of weapon and some weapons are ok but soon as you are hit once you lose the weapon and with the constant swarm of enemies and hazards that will happen almost instantly. The planets also have healing stations which slowly heal you if you stay on top of it. This can be tricky as the enemies don’t stop coming and you can’t always shield yourself as it depletes as enemies hit you.

               There are plenty of chapters and levels to playthrough if you can get through them as it will require a lot of patience and retrying. The game is designed with Co-op in mind if you find someone willing to play this chaos with you. There is also a versus option to play against each other in case you need to decide who is better at handling this chaos.

Conclusion

Aniquilation is a twin-stick shooter that seems to have forgotten it is a twin-stick shooter, or that putting so much mayhem on the screen at once doesn’t always equal fun. Shooting seems to be the attack I am using the least and although the game looks pretty enough it’s not really a joy to play for me.

This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox Series X/S. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.