I don’t usually cover the Sega Mega Drive, what with it being a dead device (cue outrage amongst retro fans), but ZPF showed up on my shores, and as an old school shmup fan, I was up for plugging in the antenna cable through numerous adaptors to play it through the telly. You mean this is for the PC? Marvellous.
Retro shmups aren’t games that evoke a deluge of words, are jaw-dropping, or soil your underwear through the number of features they boast, cutting-edge visuals, or are likely to convert your casual friends who can’t get away from Animal Crossing or Roblox. ZPF is among that list, I’m afraid. That’s not a bad thing for fans of these types of games, because the way it plays is mostly as expected, it’s just not going to win over new legions of fans.
What appealed to me most about ZPF might be the same for you: the visuals. This is pretty darn special in terms of 90s side-scrolling looks. Backgrounds are hectic, colours are borderline eye-bleeding, and there’s an excellent variety of enemies, bosses and also one of the three ‘vessels’ you employ. Gameplay gets manic, and with these ageing eyes, I could only manage short bursts. It’s not quite bullet hell, nor is it overly complicated; there’s just a fair amount going on at the same time.
Basic gameplay is the same; all you need to do is ‘point and click’ your ship. The three vessels, two ships and a Gundam-like Knight, are all quite different. The Gladius was my choice as the all-rounder as it covers more area at the caveat of being weaker. The Knight is an interesting one, as it can shoot projectiles, but its main power is the melee attack. I just couldn’t get accustomed to melee attacks in shmup. Sure, ZPF doesn’t have colour-coded patterns, in-depth lore, new weapons or quantum physics, though the melee was about timing, and that didn’t resonate with me with this style of play.
There are seven biomes to explore, with three available to begin with. The starting locations are all very different and, evidently, more challenging than the next. Coming back to the comment about doing things in bursts, if you attack each one back and forth, you’ll soon understand the attack patterns and be able to predict the projectiles. As stated, this isn’t bullet hell, but it can get pretty damn frustrating when you get caught in a corner and encounter instant death.
Instant deaths in ZPF are perhaps the biggest challenge, as death equates to restarting, and without the right gear and motivation to climb a leaderboard (it appears to be local only?), I personally became disheartened with it. I may have been pulled back quite predictably with scanline options and other bits and bobs, yet none of it was on offer. You can modify the amount of currency you have and the percentage you lose in the menu, but this wasn’t really enough of a carrot. However, this can be beneficial with repeat plays, as between stages, you can visit a merchant to unlock extras. Like a… hint?!
ZPF was one of a handful of games for which I received a review code that was locked until the release date. As is usually the case on Steam, user reviews go up pretty quickly, and I couldn’t help but read some. One thing I noted was that ZPF was originally a homebrew title, with one comment arguing that that version had all those extras that perhaps I’d like to have seen in this. So, take that as you will. Visually, it’s impressive, but it hasn’t left so much of an afterthought to me to come back to it.
