INTRO:
After the success of some of the earlier PixelJunk games, especially PixelJunk Monsters, Q-Games has released another entry to the PixelJunk series. Again, this particular entry has nothing to do with its predecessors beyond a mere common brand-name.
Like its predecessor that is Monsters, PixelJunk Shooter has a deceptively simple name that does not tell of its surprisingly sophisticated gameplay.
PREMISE:
Far into the future, humanity, with its typical avarice, had exhausted Earth’s resources and now looks to the stars for more. It is not long before interstellar corporations have obtained footholds on other planets, ravaging them for all their worth. However, the unknown often carries plenty of dangers, and it just so happens that many of these would be within the very planets that humanity seeks to exploit.
Apoxus Prime is one such planet. After an exploratory/harvesting operation on it has gone incommunicado for a while, the curiously whale-shaped space-ship ERS Piñita Colada was sent to investigate. Its solution for this crisis is primarily a pair of special and very agile crafts that can spelunk without much of a problem. Into the crux of the planet that one or two of the vehicles would go into, looking for survivors and eliminating any threats – while nicking a treasure or two along the way.
SHIP MOVEMENT:
As mentioned earlier, the player’s ship is a nimble vehicle. In addition to some kind of system that suspends it in the air, it has thrusters that fires in bursts to stabilize its position.
This is not just for cosmetic purposes. The ship indeed bobs about in its current location. This can be a problem if the player is trying to have the ship tuck itself into a tight corner to avoid sprays of dangerous liquids. Of course, the player could have done better by not having the ship get into such a situation in the first place.
Despite its nimbleness, the ship also has its own inertia. It does not stop immediately when the player stops entering directional input, but has momentum remaining from its previous motion that will carry it forward some more. Fortunately, the player can compensate by entering small inputs in the opposite direction.
In the console version of the game, or rather, with a controller as the main peripheral, there is a button that is dedicated to having the ship dash forward. With the keyboard and mouse, dashing is automatically initiated after holding any directional input for a couple of seconds. The delay would have been poorly appreciated, but immediate dashing is rarely needed if the player is careful enough to spot nearby potential hazards.
The ship has the same movement speed in any direction regardless of its actual facing, which is convenient. Its actual facing, as indicated by a cursor, is only used for aiming its weapons and its winch, which will be described shortly.
If the player changes the facing of the ship very quickly, e.g. a complete revolution in a heartbeat, the ship spins. This can be used in several ways, as will be described later.
WINCH/LASSO:
The ship has a winch with a curiously bulbous end that can be launched forward to grab survivors, power-ups and certain other objects, in addition to interacting with switches and plugs. It has a rather short range, but it can go through any body of fluids without any resistance. (It so happens that there is a unique sound effect for each kind of body of fluids that the winch plunges into.)
The winch also has conveniently fast retraction, thus allowing the player to launch it quite rapidly, which is very useful when there are multiple survivors clustered together.
However, when holding onto things with the winch, the ship’s inertia is increased, so this should not be done when there are enemies around.
BLASTERS:
The main armaments of the ship are rapid-fire blasters. These are mainly used to shoot up the wayward automated defences of the installations on Apoxus Prime, as well as its deadly indigenous life-forms (who are somehow in cahoots with the former). Shooting is as simple as pointing the ship at them and firing away.
There are more nuances to the ship’s blasters though. For one, it can shoot down certain projectiles that enemies launch, such as missiles and metal shards. Of course, this would seem nothing new to a player that is experienced in shoot-‘em-up titles.
Another nuance that is not so typical is that the blaster shots can affect liquids. This is not easily discovered at first, at least until the player has the ship going into water – or lava (more on how this can happen later) – and shoot out of the body of liquid. This physical occurrence will be elaborated later.
MISSILES:
Perhaps surprisingly, the ship packs missiles that it can somehow fabricate and stock in its chassis. If there is a pack of enemies that the player needs to deal with and the blasters may not suffice in getting rid of them as quickly as possible, the missiles can remove them quickly.
However, using the missiles is a tricky thing. The missiles do not fire straight and actually corkscrew around a bit. Although they may be homing missiles, their corkscrewing makes it difficult to hit moving enemies. Most importantly, using the missiles causes the ship’s temperature gauge to fill up (more on this later).
Eventually, a skilled and experienced player may realize that missiles are not really needed to complete the game with.
TEMPERATURE GAUGE:
The ship is not indestructible, but how its demise can come about can be interesting.
Instead of using the usual system of hitpoints to represent the ship’s durability, it has a temperature gauge instead. Pixeljunk Shooter is not the first game to use the system of temperature gauges to represents its survivability, but it is indeed one of very few to use it solely as a measure for that.
If the gauge fills up completely, the player loses control of the ship, which starts smoking alarmingly as it falls prey to gravity. After a fall of a few seconds, it blows up. If it crashes onto a hard surface, it blows up too.
The gauge fills up as the ship takes damage; at best, it can only take two consecutive shots before the player loses control. Coming into contact with fluids of opposing temperature, which is lava by default, immediately causes loss of control. (There will be more on fluids later.)
The temperature gauge will also slowly fill up if the ship comes into proximity with inimical liquids; the closer it is to the liquids, the faster the gauge fills up. This occurs even through walls, which can be irksome to learn the first time around, especially if one is thinking that walls and rocks would act as insulation.
Partial coronae appear around the sprite for the ship when this occurs. This is very convenient, especially in dealing with a visual issue about small bodies of fluids that will be described later.
If the player can have the ship hiding somewhere safe, its gauge will slowly deplete. The player can hasten the process by having the ship doing cartwheels, though these only work best when the gauge is dangerously filled. If there happens to be accommodating liquids nearby, the player immediately empty the gauge by immersing the ship in them.
It has been mentioned earlier that the player loses control of the ship when its temperature gauge fills up. However, there is still a chance to save it from an explosive doom; if the ship comes into contact with whichever fluid (water or lava) that can empty the gauge, the player regains control.
Such second-wind moments can be very memorable in single-player. In the multiplayer co-op mode, having one’s partner save one’s ship from disaster with the winch is just as memorable too.
It is worth noting here that taking damage from anything but not spinning out of control immediately causes the ship to gain a couple of seconds of invulnerability, during which the player must have it move out of harm’s way.
FLUIDS:
Firstly, it has to be mentioned that the phrase “fluids” above refers to both liquids and gases that can be found in the game.
The liquid that the player will encounter the earliest is water. There are bodies of water to be found in most levels. By default, the player’s ship can cool itself quickly by plunging into water or having itself doused by onrushing water. By default, the ship’s blasters can also shoot through water. However, their shots could only travel so far before dissipating.
For the first few levels, water only seems to be a liquid that splashes around. On the other hand, its splashing around is quite convincing. The game appears to perform this through modelling the fluids as rolling particles of rapidly changing sizes and shapes that can clump together or break apart very freely, especially when subjected to stresses. This physical simulation is not just for cosmetic purposes though; this will be revealed when the game introduces another liquid.
Lava is the next liquid to be encountered in the course of the game. As to be expected of lava, it is ominously bright, and if that visual cue is not enough, hissing steaming noises can be heard if the player’s ship comes too close to the lava. Then, of course, there are the coronae that had been mentioned earlier.
By default, lava is dangerous to the ship, and it blocks the ship’s default blasters. Touching lava automatically causes loss of control, and plunging into lava leads straight to a restart.
Lava is substantially more viscous than water. This can be seen when lava flows; it appears to have a lot more inertia. This is convenient, because there are more than a few times in the game when the player needs to break dams of lava to release them onto something else; getting out of the way is definitely mandatory.
However, there is more entertainment to be had from lava, but that would be described when the various “suits” that the ship can don are described later.
There are interactions between water and lava when they come into contact with each other, though this will be described later.
The last liquid to be introduced in the game is some kind of dark viscous liquid. This is perhaps the most unfamiliar fluid in the game, especially considering that water and lava appear to behave as expected. At first glance, one would think that it is oil, but its metallic sheen would strongly suggest that it is liquid metal.
It looks ominous enough, but it only becomes creepier when the player’s ship comes close to it. There is no corona that warns the player that the fluid is dangerous, but there is the visual cue of the fluid seemingly bunching itself up to reach out to the ship. If the player is curious enough to have the ship touch the liquid, he/she would learn the hard way that it is inimical. Fortunately, the player does not suffer immediate loss of control of the ship as he/she would from contact with lava (or water in certain circumstances).
Anyway, the black liquid flows very slowly. This can be a major problem if the player is trying to dodge drips of it. In fact, black liquid that is flowing off an edge can shower drips for a long time. This is a problem that occurs late into the game in one level. (That is also perhaps the reason for the ship not immediately shorting out when it touches the liquid.)
Another property of the black liquid is revealed when it comes into contact with water. When it does, the fluid and water disappears. In their place, bubbles of slightly beige gases appear and float straight upwards. Curiosity eventually informs the player that these gases somehow fill up the ship’s gauge the longer it stays in the cloud. This is perhaps for the better, because the game shortly informs the player of the other hazard that the bubbles pose.
They ignite when they either come into contact with lava or open electrical currents. Curiously, neither blasters nor missile fire ignite the bubbles, but the latter’s explosions cause bubbles to disappear. This can be used in a last ditch effort to break apart thin clouds of bubbles, but this is a rare opportunity; the clouds tend to be very huge and dense, and the missiles go through them anyway.
Most levels have some drains somewhere to channel out excess fluids, especially if there are sources from which these fluids flow. However, there are a few deliberately intense levels where there are no drains at all, but there are sources; this typically requires the player to outrun the flood of fluids. Even floods of water can be a problem, as will be elaborated later.
PROBLEM WITH FLUID FLOW:
There may be an issue about how the game simulates small bodies of fluids; this has been alluded to earlier. Through the rigors of trying to flow about, the bodies of fluids can become terrifically small and thin, to the point that foreground objects, such as the textures for indestructible rock, would obscure them from view.
This is not an issue if the fluids are innocuous, but if they are inimical to the ship, the player could unwittingly have the ship coming a bit too close to a surface that has been wetted with them but which the player could not see.
At least proximity to lava or water would cause the aforementioned coronae to appear, but there is no visual warning for the black liquid. The player would be able to see the black liquid if there is a lot of it that can obviously bunch up, but thin slivers of the liquid would not.
REMOVABLE FOREGROUND SOLIDS:
Most of the solids in the foreground are indestructible rock or invulnerable alloy structures; for all purposes, they are nothing more than boundaries of the levels.
However, a couple of solid substances in the game can be removed, one of them being more straightforward to destroy than the other.
When water and lava comes into contact with each other, they form fragile rock that can be shot apart. Certain levels use this rock to plug dams of water or black liquid with; destroying it is often part of the solution for the level.
What is not immediately obvious about this igneous rock is that it can actually interact with water and lava that is in contact with it. To be more precise, the water on one side of the rock can interact with lava on the other, even through the rock.
Water that touches igneous rock that is in contact with lava would boil; if the player gets close enough, he/she can hear the boiling. The lava on the other side would cool and form more rock. However, the process is not efficient; an observant player would notice that more water is needed. This is a lesson that has to be kept in mind in some levels that have limited water.
If there happens to be more rock than lava when the rock dams the latter, the rock would hold. However, if there happens to be substantially more lava than rock when the former splashes over the latter, the rock actually crumbles. The rock will give way completely eventually – learning about this the hard way can be displeasing, but it is one of the entertaining nuances of the game anyway.
Some time into the game, the player would learn that the ship can churn through igneous rock by spinning through them. This is time-consuming though; it is more efficient to just shoot through them whenever possible.
The other solid is ice. It is formed out of water, obviously, but unlike actual ice, the ice in Apoxus Prime is diamond-hard. It cannot be destroyed with blaster and missile fire, nor spun through with the ship’s spinning. The ice can only be permanently removed by splashing at it with lava.
Ice can be formed by having water splash over ice; the formation can grow alarmingly quickly if there happens to be a lot of water and ice coming into contact with each other. This is even more distressing if the player’s ship is caught in the water; being encased in ice is a straight failure.
There are even creatures that can turn water into ice quickly, and it so happens that these tend to appear when the player’s ship is within water. In fact, there are a few levels where the player must outrun quickly-forming ice, which is certainly a nice variation of the usual situations that require the player to outrun floods.
The only way to turn ice back into water is by having laser beams heat them up, but these appear in rare few levels.
FLUID-UTILIZING OBJECTS:
Some of the most entertaining elements in the gameplay of PixelJunk Shooter are inanimate objects that interact with the fluids.
The first of these that the player would encounter is a sci-fi sponge. This is introduced in a water- and lava-filled level, and there happens to be entertainment from either solving the level correctly or making a silly mistake with the sponge.
The sponge can absorb water through a particularly large hole in it; this increases its size. There are also other handy visual indicators that show how much more liquid that it can absorb.
Picking up the sponge with the winch causes the sponge to release its contents through smaller holes. The showers are surprisingly wide, so the player can douse quite a large area.
Interestingly, the sponge can absorb lava too. Dousing things with lava is tremendously dangerous, but necessary for overcoming certain obstacles.
There is also another device that can absorb fluids; these appear very late into the game. Unlike the sponge, this device has smaller capacity and will eject absorbed fluids in a geyser immediately after it has become full. Indeed, it can be difficult to transport around if it is already firing a jet of liquid. Not only does the player have to deal with the inertia, he/she may have to avoid the jet if it is of a liquid that can damage the ship.
An example of the peculiar ecosystem of Apoxus Prime can be seen in certain plants that produce fruits that contain copious amounts of water or even lava. These are introduced early on, when the player must use them in order to overcome certain obstacles.
However, the player may want to keep in mind that they explode upon hitting any surface when released from the ship’s winch. The liquid that they release can be thrown up quite high, possibly putting the ship in harm’s way if the liquid is inimical to the player’s ship.
SUITS:
Throughout the game, the player would come across ports that the player’s ship can dock with in order to receive modifications to the ship that last for the entirety of the levels that they are in. These modifications, oddly enough, are called “suits”. (Perhaps this is an allusion to mecha anime, but if it is, it may not seem appropriate to people who are not aware of such entertainment media.)
Anyway, suits alter the ship’s capabilities; some even switch out its weapons to entirely different ones.
The first suit to be obtained is the water suit. As its name suggests, the water suit replaces the ship’s blasters and missiles with a water jet cannon, which cannot affect any enemy except firebugs (more on these later). However, when it does appear, it means that there are puzzles involving lava nearby.
When this suit is active, the ship cannot break through igneous rock by shooting through them; the ship must spin through them instead. This can be a chore, but fortunately, it does not occur very often.
The magma suit is perhaps the most problematic of all the suits. It replaces the ship’s weapons with a lava jet cannon, but does not grant the ship immunity to lava itself. This is a very risky suit to use.
Perhaps it has been deliberately designed to be so, but it would be difficult for some people to believe that the developers could play-test the game without frustration at the idiosyncrasies of the suit.
Anyway, there may be some satisfaction from spewing lava uphill of enemies and watching them being damaged as the lava flows down. Otherwise, the magma suit is to be mainly used for puzzles involving removal of ice.
Other changes involving the magma and water suit are not as clear, at least not immediately. These changes are indicated by the visual changes in the winch of the ship. For example, in the case of the magma suit, the round winch changes into a claw.
The upgraded winch can do the usual things that the default one can. In addition, it can interact with the aforementioned removable solids. For example, the winch of the water suit can latch onto and break apart ice, which is convenient, considering the semi-invulnerability of ice on Apoxus Prime.
The inverter suit is the next suit to be introduced. It inverts the temperature gauge of the ship and its responses to water and lava; that the ship is aflame after picking up the suit is a visual cue of this change.
Strangely, getting close to water when the ship is in an inverter suit has the same effect as getting close to lava when the ship is not. This may not seem believable to some people, but then this fits the namesake effects.
The most entertaining bit about the inverter suit is that the ship can plunge into lava and shoot into and out of it. Where water could not stop shots fired by the ship or enemies, lava certainly could – except for shots fired by the magma suit. This means that the player’s ship can plunge into lava and fire out of it, all the while being protected by the lava.
(Conversely, the ship’s shots cannot go through water when it is donning the magma suit.)
As mentioned earlier, lava is more viscous than water. This can be used to the player’s advantage when shooting out of lava. If the player fires fast enough, the lava will follow the stream of shots for quite a long distance; this can be used as an alternative solution in some puzzles.
SURVIVORS:
As mentioned earlier, there are people that have survived the calamity on Apoxus Prime. Interestingly, all of them wear full-body hazard suits, so the player will not be seeing anything that suggests that they are human in addition to their humanoid shape.
Anyway, these survivors are strewn all over the levels, conveniently staying put until they are picked up by the winch of the player’s ship – or killed by hazards or stray shots.
At least the survivors appear to be well-equipped. Their hazard suits prevent them from drowning in water and asphyxiating in gas clouds; they also appear to be anchored to the ground that they stand on, as long as they are alive. Onrushing water would hardly shove them about. Some even have capsules that can float on lava and black liquid as they can on water.
However, anything else kills them. More often than not, enemies spawn near them; although they will not shoot at the survivors, stray shots either from them or, embarrassingly, the player’s ship can kill them immediately. Sometimes, the player’s solutions for getting past obstacles also happens to place them in the way of harm, so the player must either rescue them beforehand or be really quick.
There are more than five survivors in any level, but the player cannot lose any more than five – and in any attempt across a stage too, for the game will track the number of deaths among survivors even after the player retries a level (which resets any fallen survivor, but not said number).
If the player loses five survivors across all retries at a stage, he/she immediately sees a game-over screen and has to restart that stage all over.
(A stage is a collection of levels with similar visual themes.)
This is not clearly told to the player unfortunately. Only an obnoxious counter with icons that light up at the bottom of the screen would inform the player of how many more survivors that the player could lose.
There is one particular level in which a few survivors are situated on top of igneous rock, above a long drop. Learning that gravity kills them too can be amusing.
Clearing a level of survivors – either by rescuing them or having them slain – opens up the rune-covered exit gates. There is no narrative explanation for this. However, it is perhaps in the player’s interest to save them; there is the reason of the aforementioned counter, and the player would be rewarded with a bit of treasure if he/she can save each of them.
There are also survivors that are sometimes hidden away in places that are not visible to the player by default. These are usually ‘special’ survivors, who wear colours other than the usual orange and yellow. They also happen to carry and wave ridiculously huge flags, if the player does not get the idea that they are special already.
The ‘reward’ for their rescue is their exclamations about what had happened on Apoxus Prime. Most of them are foreshadowing about the bosses that the player would encounter.
COLLECTIBLES:
There are collectibles in the game that can be retrieved, but instead of contributing to a score counter of some kind, they are associated with the aforementioned counter of slain survivors.
Most of these collectibles are floating circle-and-star tokens that float about in place – even in walls and impervious rock – waiting for the ship to come close and pick them up. In fact, when the ship comes by, it attracts them towards it. The player can extend the range at which the ship can attract the tokens by spinning the ship.
When the player collects 100 points of these token, as depicted by a counter at the bottom of the screen, the death counter for survivors reduces by one icon.
Alternatively, the player can pick up what appears to be an oval-shaped icon to immediately reduce the counter by one icon.
Other collectibles include power-ups that grant the ship a hazard shield. This protects the ship from ambient heating/cooling, as well as ignores the first source of damage that the ship takes (at the cost of the shield immediately dissipating). Not counting the suits (which are side-grades), this type of power-up is perhaps the only one that straight-upgrades the ship.
The most valuable collectible are curiously and naturally cut jewels that are often stuck in igneous rock or barely sticking out of the foreground. Most are easy to spot once uncovered, but some are obscured by the foreground in a manner similar to the issue of obscured fluids that has been described earlier.
Anyway, these are needed not just for bragging rights; further levels have entry barriers imposed onto them to prevent entry. These barriers can only be overcome by collecting enough jewels, and it is not clear how many the player needs either.
This is perhaps one of the weakest elements in the game, but it probably would not be an issue to anyone that is not in a hurry to rush through the game.
ENEMIES:
As mentioned earlier, most of the enemies in the game are the haywire defences of the facilities on Apoxus Prime. Most enemies pop out of nowhere for no reason that the game explains, but they do fulfill the role of adding challenge to the levels where pre-existing enemies could not have done.
Most enemies in the game are turrets, which are a lot easier to destroy than more mobile enemies. There are not many types of enemies in the game, but each type feels quite different from the rest. For example, the bat-shaped robots that emit intermittent fields that deflect shots and missiles are certainly more troublesome than most other enemies. They also happen to immediately destroy the ship if they collide with it.
It has been mentioned earlier that taking shots from enemies fill up the ship’s temperature gauge. Most shots can be avoided easily because they are so slow. The player can also spin the ship to deflect incoming shots; incidentally, the hit-box for the ship is particularly large in regard to this feature. Using this effectively is a mark of an experienced player, though said player would have just dodged the shots entirely.
Next, there are creatures or machines that can fire jets of water or lava. These can be terribly troublesome, but they can be exploited for their unlimited reserves of water and lava.
Most enemies can be destroyed with just blaster shots and missiles, but it is perhaps more entertaining to destroy them by having lava flow over them, or in the case of water-sensitive enemies, water.
BOSSES:
The best enemies to fight in the game are the bosses. There are only a few of them, but each is terrifically different from the others.
For example, there is a worm-like boss that is initially nonchalant to the ship’s presence, but to progress, the player must anger it by doing something that would have to be performed again later to defeat it.
If there is any similarity between these bosses, it is that they follow the trope of weak points. At least these weak points are not clichéd enough to be glowing or throbbing. Nevertheless, they should be visually obvious to most people. Nevertheless, getting to these weak spots are not easy, because the bosses happen to be aware that the rest of their bodies are invulnerable to the ship’s blaster shots.
Perhaps the most memorable boss is the one which the player’s ship must latch onto with the winch in order to defeat it. The player has to aim at the boss’s weak spot, while the ship hitches a ride on this fast boss.
VISUAL DESIGNS:
Much like the previous entries in the PixelJunk series, Shooter makes use of simply-coloured sprites and colourful but dull-lit artwork for its backgrounds.
The game could have been better-looking if the colours were more vibrantly applied. Yet, if this had been the case, objects of great interest such as lava would not have been contrasted significantly against anything else. The contrast is very convenient, so perhaps the dull colours are appropriate.
The appearance of the ship may seem odd at first. It looks a lot like a ship that one would see in top-down shooters, but this is a 2D-planar shooter. Thus, it would appear to be flying on its sides, which is perhaps as awkward-looking as a flounder, to cite an analogy in the natural world. The ship is also not much bigger than the survivors that it has to save, so one would wonder how it accommodates them.
On the other hand, believability has never been a hallmark of PixelJunk titles – not that this is to the detriment of the series.
Both the ship and enemies fire shots, so it is fortunate that the visual designs for their shots are different. Shots that are fired by enemies have very simple polygons, whereas the ship’s blaster shots are a lot more detailed.
The prettiest things to be seen in the game are the liquids. Water, lava and the black liquid all have their own visual designs, some of which have been described earlier. For example, the surfaces of churning water look convincingly foamy, whereas lava always looks like slurry.
SOUND DESIGNS:
The band that is High Frequency Bandwidth provided the music for PixelJunk Shooter. This is perhaps just as well, because this band is quite popular in the indie scene and the music is the first sound that the player hears in the game.
The tracks are appropriately suspenseful for the settings of the game’s story. For example, the soundtrack that emphasizes the unknown within the void of space for the main menu switches to a more energetic one when the player starts the game in either single-player or multiplayer, which is a fitting audio accompaniment to the short cutscene of the player’s ship (or ships) diving into the depths of Apoxus Prime.
There are more levels than there are soundtracks, but there are enough of the latter that they would not sound too repetitive anytime soon from being used for multiple levels. The soundtracks for combat may eventually get repetitive though, because there are only a few of these for the substantial number of fights.
The other sound designs in the game are not designed by the indie band, but they appropriately fit the game’s sci-fi settings anyway. There is the familiar “pew-pew” for the ship’s blasters, though these do sound quite beefy. The same can also be said for the satisfying whooshes of missile fire. In contrast, the shots from enemies sound a lot teensier, and all of them happen to sound the same (in addition to looking similar). This is a bit disappointing, but it is convenient from the perspective of gameplay.
Perhaps the most interesting noises in the game are those that are associated with the liquids. Some have been mentioned earlier, such as bubbling noises for water interacting with lava and the ominous roiling noises that lava make.
MULTIPLAYER:
Unfortunately, although Q-Games may have ported PixelJunk shooter to the computer platform, it may not have taken advantage of everything that the platform can offer.
For one, the multiplayer feature of the game is still strictly a local co-op affair, like it was in the original version of the game. Furthermore, players still share the same screen, with the borders of the screen effectively becoming barriers. Getting either ship destroyed ends the attempt at the level.
Yet, this does mean that local co-op is still a fun experience as it was in the original Playstation 3 version, despite Q-Game’s passing of the opportunity for online multiplayer (yet again).
The other player (who uses the spare green ship) must use a controller; the keyboard and mouse are strictly reserved for the main player (who controls the default yellow ship). For most levels, the level layout and obstacles remain the same.
However, for levels where there are magma or water suits, there is an additional port for a diametrically-opposing suit. This means that both players would have different capabilities, and thus more options to solve problems. Any player can also attempt to rescue the other by using the winch to get them out of harm’s way.
On the other hand, both ships are also unwittingly obstacles in each other’s way. Neither ship can pass through the other without colliding, which causes both to be tossed about a bit. Moreover, if either player is clumsy, the experience can be rather rough, especially if either player (or both) is attempting to rescue all survivors, who have to contend with twice the risk of friendly fire.
CONCLUSION:
If one is to compare Shooter with the previous titles in the PixelJunk series, especially Monsters, one can consider that it offers a much shorter experience. However, every bit of that experience makes use of the very sophisticated physics for fluids and the capabilities of the versatile ship that the player gets to control.
One could fault Q-Games for having not done anything but port the game straight-over to the computer platform with little optimization beyond pixel resolutions and keyboard and mouse support. Yet, at its current build, PixelJunk Shooter is a very well-done indie title for a game that is more than three years old, with few if any contenders in the indie scene.