Today's video game review is a budget action roguelike game called Tetra Gun, which I picked up last week. It's only £2 on Steam, oh yes, and I've had a blast playing it. It calls itself a quadrant-based shooter, which I'll explain. You play as this rail gun in the centre of the screen, and enemies will come at you in 360 degrees all the way around the screen, across 7 waves. And the reason why it's like like tetragon is because each wave comes with a different coloured background. Each wave gets progressively harder and once you clear a wave, so long as you survive, you get an upgrade to choose from, hence the roguelike element. But so does the enemy, depending on how you spin like a wheel of fortune roulette wheel. So you might up your capabilities but so do the enemies and then they become more plentiful and more and like quicker and start to like dart around the screen and things like that and it's all very clever. However coming back to that quadrant based shooter there's a control scheme of this game that took me five or ten minutes to get used to and then it becomes quite pivotal, literally, to the way how you play the game. So if you see in the center of the screen there's like four arrows or lines that come out from your tetragun. These split the game screen up into four areas up, down, left and right. And the only way how to analog stick. So to kind of put that into practice you might have enemies coming from the right and the left. You might see that the ones at the right are moving faster and are going to hit you quicker because one touch and it's game over. So you'll flick the right analog stick to the right then use the left analog stick once your turret has rotated around to then pick off an aim and shoot and kill all of the enemies. Then you'll flick the right analog stick to the left. Your turret will rotate around and there's definitely a delay in that. And then you use the left analog stick to aim and shoot things off there. And the key here is because enemies are coming at different pace and depending on what upgrades your enemies have, they might walk from quadrant to quadrant, for example. Or they might split out into multiple options and kind of straddle a couple of quadrants where they're coming down a center line. You have to pick where you're going to go, what's coming first, and then prioritize your right analog stick movements to rotate your gun around because it's not the fastest in the world, and then aim with the left. I've probably made that sound far more complicated than it is in reality, but I definitely had for the first 5 or 10 minutes a right brain left brain fade moment, then it clicked and I was off and away and had a blast. The other cool thing is that as you kill more enemies with your secondary weapons or as you can clear runs with your primary weapon, you then unlock other weapons to equip to your tetra gun. And this dramatically changes how you approach the game. Because a shotgun has a spread of bullets that will fly out, whereas a laser is really thin and direct but very powerful. A shotgun is not nearly as fast as say the normal quickfire gun and so it depends on what gun you pick, the difficulty level you choose and the primary and secondary weapons that you equip. So there's one where it's got like a wheeled spike that will fly around the screen and that's quite helpful. There's other ones that kind of send out a bomb in a quadrant type thing. It depends on how you equip your gun as to your tactics that you play. And then that plays into what upgrades you choose. Because at the end of each wave, you've got things that might increase the speed of your rotation of your gun. It might increase the range of a bullet. It might increase the damage of a bullet. It might give you a shield, which can then be almost like thinking of an arcanoid. It will block a specific quadrant, and that can be helpful. You can also put in additional turrets so that they can shoot things, and that looks after a quadrant for you so you don't need to think about it unless something's coming in fast and it can't keep up. There's a lot of variation in here, and one of my favorite things is the asteroid belt and this is as you kill enemies you get a random chance of it becoming an asteroid that then circles around the perimeter of your gun and if you get and choose that early you can build up a proper asteroid belt that blocks loads of things coming in to you and can be very very powerful particularly on harder difficulties. For a game that's £2 on release and I think it's £2.49 now that it's launch week discounts gone this has no right being as addictive and as fun and as ridiculous as it is and yeah it doesn't look great on the screen it's quite minimalistic but it absolutely kicks ass and yeah this is one of those little budget games that can. Thoroughly recommended to anyone that likes a real simplified distilled down Arcadian for want of a better phrase action roguelike. It will definitely give you a good few hours of gameplay for the price point so it's definitely a bargain. Higher Plain Games is part of the Higher Plain Network, a completely independent media outlet supported by people like you. The goal is to create the best possible content that cultivates a richer indie scene for games as well as music and entertainment. To find out more and to get involved visit patreon.com forward slash higher play network. Your support makes all the difference and in return you'll gain access to bonus content and downloads. Thank you for watching. you