Everyday Shooter (PlayStation 3)

CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars Excellent
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Overall score: 8.0 (4.0 stars)
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Gamespot editors' review

• Reviewed by: Alex Navarro
• Reviewed on: 10/12/2007
• Released on: 10/11/2007

Everyday Shooter is anything but an everyday shooter. Such a title belies this game's level of creativity, though maybe that was the point. Developed by a single programmer named Jonathan Mak, this is a wonderfully unique and engaging spin on the Robotron-style dual-stick shooter that countless games have copied to death over the years. It offers up eight stages that provide entirely separate challenges from one another and a solid level of difficulty. It also has a dreamy vibe created by its fantastic art style and bedroom rock soundtrack. It's the sort of offbeat little game that will probably either bore or irritate some people to no end, but for those who can appreciate its eccentricities, it's a real treat.

It might have a lot in common with all the other Robotron clones of the world, but Everyday Shooter is an island unto itself in terms of style and atmosphere.

The second you jump into the game, Everyday Shooter assaults you with its quirkiness. The menu system is just blue text on a bluer background. Once you hop into the first stage, you're presented with an ethereal-sounding guitar track while something that looks like a Windows Media Player visualizer fades in and out. From there, the first stage loads up and you're essentially left to your own devices as you deal with oddly colored shapes coming at you in strings while you control a nondescript-looking white dot that will fire shots at said shapes when you press the right analog stick in a specific direction.

Apart from the strange art style, that probably sounds just like any other Robotron clone out there. However, what makes Everyday Shooter so intriguing is the way you build scores. Just shooting stuff doesn't net you points. Instead, you have to collect tiny pixels that spill out of specific enemies. Getting those pixels to appear is initially tough, at least until you figure out the chaining system for a specific stage. On the first stage, you have to shoot a specific object type to create a sort of black hole that increases in size the more you fire at it. Any enemy that touches it explodes into a mass of collectable pixels.

The trick is no two stages are alike. One moment, you might be blasting away at a large blob to simultaneously kill all the smaller blobs connected to it while deftly avoiding huge waves of enemy fire. But the next moment, you'll be shooting a giant eye and some very specific spherical enemies while a whole mess of spherical enemies come pouring out of it. With each progression to the next stage, the chaining systems become more obscure and the challenge ramps up considerably.

In fact, by the time you hit the third stage, you'll probably be begging for some kind of "kill everything" superweapon like most shooters of this ilk tend to include. No such luck. You either figure out how to do the chain kills or you're boned. It doesn't help that your nondescript dot doesn't move especially fast. You move faster when you aren't shooting, but even then, you feel a tad sluggish. It's also hard to pick up a lot of those dropped pixels because you don't just absorb them the second you touch them. They drag behind you as you move, so you kind of have to stop for a second to absorb them. It's the sort of thing that is initially very frustrating, but you eventually get used to once you figure out the strategy for each stage. Still, some kind of last ditch effort superweapon would have been a big help.

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