After an audible sigh, a shrug of shoulders, and a cracking of future arthritis-ridden digits, you’ll be glad of that time invested in a bit of mindless repetition to unlock the goodness hidden within Galactic Glitch and thankful you can now shred those simulations with some overpowered melee gear. Then die trying.
A twin-stick shooter rogue-like from Crunchy Leaf Games, you play an anomaly spacecraft vessel floating around in a simulation that wouldn’t look out of place in a school documentary detailing how membranes work if directed by Daft Punk, inspired by Tron, and drawing upon concepts from Stephen Hawking’s reading material.
From a top-down perspective, you shift through each room, wipe out the enemies, then explore the next, in a view to crush glitches, beat bosses, and find out which castle they’re storing the princess in. Because Galactic Glitch is a rogue-like shmup, expect a rinse-and-repeat approach of having a good run followed by a death, a swifter death, then maybe a not-so-good run, more deaths, then a new toy to get excited about.
Galactic Glitch Review
Starting with a well-balanced ship, through exploration, you can unlock others that focus on speed and damage-dealing. The differences can be subtle, so preference in cosmetics and marginal gains will be the decider on which to choose, allowing you to tinker more with the weapons on offer.
The weapons have a distance limitation, which defines them as either ranged or melee. The former can keep you relatively safe but not so powerful, but grab yourself the void daggers, get up close to enemies and shred them. Yes, those were my favourites. Alas, these choices aren’t available immediately. With it being a rogue-like, you have to explore and repeat runs in the hope of blueprint drops that unlock new stuff.
In addition to the base weapons, there’s a charged one with a short cooldown, and they can slowly be upgraded – again, through blueprints. Power-ups are on offer, too, with poison trails, drones and turning enemy missiles against them for a bonus. Even better, at the end of each area, you can upgrade your power-ups or sacrifice them to unlock upgrade shards to invest in your best ‘un’s.
I’m Gonna Hurl
You’ll note that there hasn’t been a narrative dive for Galactic Glitch, probably because there isn’t one. You have a little helper talking you through the simulation and giving tips, but the premise of the game is to keep repeating until you git gud. Admittedly, the game won’t blow you away from the screenshots, and for the first few runs, like any game in the genre, there’s a wall of monotony until you start unlocking gear/upgrades to your liking.
While on a scavenger hunt, the key part of survival without decent guns will be using the dodge option to pre-empt laser sights about to blast you, sometimes even dodging into enemies with certain power-ups to take them out. It’s essential, as later areas will have enemies who kamikaze you, and besides avoiding incoming projectiles, you simply have to keep your distance if you wish to survive.
However, the most significant aspect of survival in Galactic Glitch is the physics element written in the blurb, which involves grabbing hold of floating debris and launching it at enemies. Ammo is infinite, and hurling a rock or crate at an enemy doesn’t do significant damage, at least in my experience. I’ve been playing exclusively on the Steam Deck, and while the controls are brilliant, utilising the shoulder button to grab and throw an asteroid like an erratic Jackie Chan didn’t flow, so I never use it.
One More Go
Note the tenses ‘been playing’ and ‘never use it’. While I’m concluding with a Galactic Glitch review, I’m still playing the game. Why? Because it’s one of those games that give you the itch to play it the moment there’s some downtime.
Let’s be realistic: this isn’t the kind of game to be emotionally involved in characters, to smirk at spending that hard-earned money on a graphics card that makes games look better than real life, or to show off to your imaginary friends how good you are with combos. It’s old school, addictive in nature, and 100% gameplay-focused.
Giving the nostalgia wheel a spin, Galactic Glitch draws up memories of games like Super Stardust and perhaps a more lucid Flow. It earns that sentence we all need to utter with a decent rogue-like, which is ‘one more go’ or ‘if I just get a few more orbs to unlock X upgrade, I’ll take a break’. But you don’t. You play again and again, and once you’ve got that upgrade, you grind some more to see what’ll happen next, evoking that rogue-like itch that you have to scratch.
Galactic Glitch Review Summary
This is an excellent twin-stick shooter that ticks all the boxes one would expect for a game of its ilk. Galactic Glitch doesn’t break any new ground, and perhaps the physics aspect is an acquired taste, but for everything else, it nails it and would place some bets that once you’ve tried it (and naturally unlocked something good), you won’t put it down.
