At PAX East 2015, I was able to sit down and try out Vertex Pop’s We Are Doomed, an upcoming twin-stick shooter for the PlayStation 4 and PS Vita, and I had a fun, funky, and hectic experience.
Featuring retro, bright graphics, We Are Doomed is great to look at, and even more great to play. Instead of having long-ranged bullets or missiles, players are armed with a somewhat short laserbeam. As swarms of enemies flood the small arena that the player is stuck in, the laserbeam forces player to properly manage their movements and space around themselves, getting close enough to enemies to kill them but staying far enough away to not be killed.
We Are Doomed currently has two modes; a Wave mode and an Endless mode, with the Wave mode featuring 30 progressively harder stages of enemies and the Endless mode being, well, endless. Both modes feature the same core twin-stick shooter gameplay, but Endless mode, Vertex Pop assured me, will allow players who already completed the Wave mode to go back and still have fun.
Vertex Pop mentioned that We Are Doomed will only be single-player, and will not feature and sort of online or couch co-op multiplayer modes. Apparently, the game originally was created with a multiplayer mode, but having two players on the screen at once made things too hectic and too easy, so Vertex Pop got rid of it.
We Are Doomed is set to come out sometime next month, so keep a lookout for it for if you’re an old-school shooter fan.
