OK try to keep up with this.  You are an octopus creature who recently hatched from an eyeball.  You must explore a dungeon filled with rooms and creepy floating dragon heads.  In each room you must compete in an arena styled battle with robots.  These battles are mazes where you can shoot the robots with your one bullet.  In order to fire the bullet again, you must catch it before it hits you!  In some mazes you must shoot robots, in others you must paint the maze all your color.  GORSD combines aspects from classic single screen arcade games like Pac-Man, Crush Roller, Qix, Mr.Do!, and more.  It’s available on current consoles and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

In Adventure mode, the game starts you off outside the ruins for a brief tutorial to show you the ropes.  In the battle rooms you’ll run around mazes, changing the lines to your color.  You can shoot out one bullet that’ll bounce and zip around the maze, destroying anything it hits, including you!  Enemies can do the same thing, so watch out.  You can catch your own bullet by holding down the shoulder button, but doing this will keep you from painting the maze.  If you get hit, you’ll usually respawn, depending on the rules, but each time it takes longer to respawn, giving your opponents more time to paint the maze their color.  Depending on the rules for the maze, you can win by painting the maze all your color, or defeating all the robots.  There is a four player multiplayer mode that sounds like a lot of fun, too.

If you die too many times in Adventure mode, you change into a worm and the game says the difficulty is lowered.  But I really didn’t notice a difference.  And that’s the main problem I had with the game is that it is just too darn hard.  Other minor problems include that it’s difficult to control and predict your bullet’s movements, and the text is too small for handheld mode on the Switch.  Another minor problem I had was I didn’t really like the game’s aesthetic.  The 16-bit graphics were nice, but I think a cuter classic 80’s arcade look would’ve suited the gameplay style more.  But that’s just a personal preference.

Kid Factor:

GORSD is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Blood and Violence.  You can shoot robots and other octopus critters with bullets, which explode when defeated.  When you turn into a worm, you hop around the dungeons leaving little bloody footprint splats wherever you go, for some reason.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, and younger gamers may find it too difficult.

Tags: Game Reviews