WE ARE DOOMED (PS Vita)
If price was a factor when considering a game’s quality, WE ARE DOOMED might be in a tight spot, and it’s not even that expensive of a game. However, since prices change and don’t actually impact the content of most games, The Game Hoard does not look at the cost of a game when considering its merit. Still, WE ARE DOOMED feels like a game where its would be hard to recommend buying it, but strangely enough it works well as a game you already own. It’s the kind of game that works for a quick pick-up-and-play session when you’ve brought your Vita somewhere, and since it entered my ownership by way of PlayStation Plus’s free monthly games, I never had consider if buying it would be money well spent. But if you can get passed that barrier of entry, WE ARE DOOMED fills its role as a timewasting top-down twin-stick shooter fairly well.
Despite the title’s desperation, WE ARE DOOMED doesn’t feature any story or explanation for what’s going on. Instead, you play as a white starburst with a little black dot in its center that flies around a dark space that gets periodically invaded by a colorful background. This strange wavering background spawns in different enemies whose assault you must survive as you try and shoot them all down. Your left control stick is used for moving around the rectangular play area to dodge enemies and any shots coming your way while your right stick is how you fight back. When pressing it in a direction, a large laser beam comes out of your starburst, it extending out for a set length before tapering off. Rather than firing it like a gun though, you hold down the direction you want to fire and your laser will extend out into that space and move around to match your control stick’s movements, making it almost like a large energy club that you can swing to hit foes or leave it to hover on them for constant damage. Already, this laser is incredibly strong and can deal with most everything you face fairly quickly, but you still can build up an even more powerful super beam by collecting flashing purple shapes that appear, the length of your attack now longer and stronger for as long as you can maintain that energy.
The laser is what sets it apart from games like Geometry Wars, another twin-stick shooter with bright shapes and a similar flow to play, but WE ARE DOOMED comes up short in a few ways its fellow shooter doesn’t. One thing is the laser is a very capable weapon, very few enemies able to counter it very well, although that isn’t a condemnation of the game’s efforts to make good opposition for it. As you play further into the game you’ll go from facing simple jellyfish-like foes that mostly just move around as they please and blue darts that actively chase you to things that seem to be designed to put you in more danger. A little portal will let in a storm of small red foes who can’t be dealt with until they’re a certain distance from their spawn point so they are able to build their numbers before you can deal with them. Another counter comes in the form of a green enemy who, when defeated, splits into more foes, the idea here being that if you try to press in with your laser since you must be close enough for it to reach them, the enemies that come out of the green shapes have a good chance of hitting you. Some orange enemies shoot at you from afar, moving lasers try to deny certain areas, asteroids you can’t break fly across the screen, and some enemies will fly around the edges to deny that area as well, but besides the things you can’t beat, you can mostly handle them with your laser pretty quickly, the problems arising mostly if there are too many enemies to target all at once. The resistance is competent so you do need to be good at the game’s movement and attack style to succeed, but these enemies lack the push to really challenge your laser well. In fact, one of the few enemies who can really get aggressive with it are the closest thing this game has to bosses, giant prismatic spheres flying towards you and needing constant pressure to break down, but they’re still susceptible enough to it that the game feels no qualms in having multiple spheres appear at once to hassle you.
The batch of enemies isn’t bad in regards to keeping you moving and active during play, and you will need to learn their behavior to get by, but another area it falters compared to Geometry Wars is in regards to its modes on offer. There are only two ways to play WE ARE DOOMED, and that’s in Waves mode and Endless mode. While a game’s quality also doesn’t come from how it compares to another specific title, contextualizing your play is just as important as designing it, and WE ARE DOOMED comes up a little short there. Waves mode features 30 different waves of enemies that increase in difficulty as you go, the player able to start from the beginning or able to start from Wave 11 or 21 once they’ve reached them. This makes it fairly easy to clear this mode unless you’re going for the full run, and on top of that, your starburst is able to take multiple hits before being completely destroyed. While checkpoints are an appreciated design feature for completion focused challenges, your already powerful laser makes the extra chances to get hit feel a bit generous. Having either just the checkpoints or just the extra lives would make Waves mode a worthy challenge rather than something you’ll run dry quickly. Endless mode is about surviving as long as you can, so the extra lives there are appreciated to encourage long runs with high scores, and it’s likely this will be the mode that brings you back to play it again and again, even though it doesn’t seem truly random which order you face certain waves of enemies.
Besides trying to earn PlayStation trophies for things like clearing certain waves in certain ways, that’s essentially all there is to do in WE ARE DOOMED. The Endless mode makes it work for a game to pull out of your pocket and play during brief windows of free time though. There is enough to the need to be close to your enemies to make things active even when your weapon just needs to be angled rather than precisely targeted and the number of enemies makes play speedy and challenging as you’ll always need to be moving to survive. WE ARE DOOMED really just needs a better way to present its play to keep things fresh or more conducive to long term sessions since its current form has very little to sustain the decent design.
THE VERDICT: WE ARE DOOMED is a simple twin-stick shooter that finds a fine home on the PlayStation Vita. As a game to pull out of your pocket to play for a bit, it’s simple but active play focused on a powerful laser that you’ll need to be close to hit with makes it a good fit for intense yet short sessions, but the modes on offer barely give this design room to finds its full potential. Enemies are designed around the laser’s nature but still fall to it fairly easily, and the life system means you can last a while with little worry, but it is still a game that asks you to be an involved player and one that does have enough enemy types and wave designs to ensure it doesn’t get dull. With a bit more content or shifts to the formula, WE ARE DOOMED could rise above its comfortable spot as a decent timewaster.
And so, I give WE ARE DOOMED for PlayStation Vita…
An OKAY rating. WE ARE DOOMED’s laser feels like a great concept that found itself in a shallow pool. Experimenting with and testing the player’s ability to use it on unique foes stops short after it barely got started, and with only repeating that in more aggressive waves to look forward to, the laser loses some of its luster. The need to be close the hordes of foes you’re shooting does mean you’ll be in trouble even with your powerful weapon, but the super laser builds up at a slow pace and waves need to keep themselves manageable so there’s not much overlap between groups of enemies, meaning that the push to be quick or precise isn’t there. WE ARE DOOMED doesn’t really fail in its construction, it’s just the delivery method that needs the work the most, the player not able to keep engaging with it in any new or interesting ways that would allow the mechanics to truly shine and motivate the player to come back to it outside of coffee breaks and car trips.
WE ARE DOOMED isn’t doomed to be a dull time, but it is destined to be easily replaced with games with more going on in them. It works for a brief diversion, and that’s partly why it’s hard to explicitly tell someone it’s worthy of purchase. If you already own it, it’s a non-committal bit of challenging play with a few kindnesses given to encourage a decently sized and not overly long play session, but its laser isn’t really put to the test enough to justify buying into the experience despite its somewhat effective design.