Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Jul 4, 2021

  Way too aggressive visually. Very straining on the eyes to try and focus for even a short play session. Bullet patterns and level design are incredibly simplistic and repetitive. Same can be said for all of the bosses. Some powerups can completely trivialize the game. If you get the full power scatter shot you can literally just hold the fire button down for the entire stage and instantly kill every enemy as they appear on screen.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 4, 2021

  [b]TL;DR: Get it if you like side scrolling shooters with bopping music.[/b] A small but mighty 2-D shooter. I had a fun time playing the eight mission campaign, which took a little over an hour to beat. I wouldn't say Binarystar Infinity [BI] is a super challenging game, but some enemies/bosses can be tough at first. The game gives plenty of extra lives and power ups to keep it accessible. And if you lost, you can start over from any previous level. The power ups might be a little overpowered, however. The [spoiler]Bubble[/spoiler] power up is too strong in my opinion, since it will almost always hit enemies and allows for too little movement by the player. Stacking power ups is a thing, which looks cool but can make it too easy. A cool but debatable mechanic is the option to retrieve some of your power ups when your ship is destroyed. While I like keeping my preferred weapon, it can make the playing too forgiving. Once you beat the game, the survival mode and boss rush keep replayability up. Survival mode is pretty relaxing, while boss rush is nostalgic of your first run. My main complaint is how vanilla some of the bosses are. All bosses have pretty predictable patterns. One boss in particular felt extremely lazy and too easy ([spoiler]the seventh boss[/spoiler]). Besides that, everything else felt clean. I would also suggest adding some extra graphic settings. There is a lot of screen shaking and white screen flashes, so settings to reduce/remove those would be awesome. I would also give more difficulty options for the campaign, like in reducing the number of power ups/extra lives available. Making the scoreboard contain online high scores would be cool too. Lastly, the graphics and music are just spot on. I haven't heard good dark-synthwave like this in a while! Overall, BI is a solid shooter that is worth the price. Give it a shot!
• gamedeal user

  Feb 9, 2021

  Good bullet hell, with both hori or vertical options. Unlike many self-proclaimed retro shooters, this one rings true by that statement and genuinely sticks to a consistent and minimal aesthetic. The palette is composed of only black and white with rare hints of red for incoming bullets, enemy damage or pick-ups. Great feedback on hit confirms with an intense screen shake and visual explosion. It is admittedly a bit intense, but you strangely get used to the mayhem pretty fast. Perhaps most interesting of all was how consistent the bosses were in their behaviors. Each utilizes a primary wave of curtain bullets with a second one tying in shortly after. Then each has a movement gimmick. Boss 1 will move laterally and then dash to the edge of the player's section of the screen's real estate. Another boss will split in two to each side of the map and sweep almost to the edge of the screen with a laser tied in between them. Like most shooters, it is not long, although its length is nothing to scoff at considering how well it does what it achieves and so consistently too. Survival, Boss Rush and then co-op branching options for each mode are also there. Boss Rush is worth highlighting since the onslaught of bosses is also met with a generous degree of pick-ups, so the balance of challenge and options available are pretty good. Truly a fun endeavor with just the right balancing, with enough challenge to be somewhere in the middle of the skill level of an STG beginner and veteran.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 4, 2023

  Binarystar Infinity is a very tedious 2D retro pixel/minimalistic side scrolling console ported arcade style shoot 'em up/bullet hell game, ripping off countless identical games before it, only worse. You do get some fun pickups like orbiting defense orbs and so on, but any depth in gameplay is quickly eradicated by some of the laziest visuals I've seen. Not only were the developers so talentless they couldn't work out how to do anything but pixel "art", but they only used three colours, black, white and red. Ugh. Taking "We made our game look bad on purpose" to new depths. Gameplay itself isn't winning any awards here either, apart from the hideously bad graphics making bullet detection difficult, the game itself is highly unpolished, movement is way too fast, and won't appeal to novices or experienced, die hard fans of shmups (yes, both of them). From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. Because this is a console game, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. Once more, console peasants have made gaming worse for everyone. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Ricci Cedric Design has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Binarystar Infinity has the almost scam-like price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
• gamedeal user

  May 24, 2021

  A fun retro style bullet hell game with minimalist design accompanied by an enjoyable soundtrack. The main arcade mode consists of 8 entertaining and exciting missions on a backstory of saving earth from the invading aliens. Depending on your experience and skills, you can probably finish the arcade mode within 60 minutes. Controls are responsive and precise. The enemies are well designed and programmed to allow you to predict their movements and bullets. Killing enemies or destroying crates will drop power-ups such as different weapons, speed up, one up, and protective orbs. After completing the arcade mode, you can unlock the survival and boss rush mode to challenge yourself further. What makes this game truly shines is allowing the freedom of playing in either horizontal or vertical scrolling mode, and the co-op mode that allows your friend to join in. Highly recommended for fans of retro bullet hell game or even if you are not a fan you will be once you are done with this game!