Astroblasters is a side-scrolling 2D space shooter that seems to have emerged from a video game time capsule originally buried in the early '90s. The game borrows liberally from Gradius and other like-minded 16-bit shooters by pitting you, in a single diminutive ship, against seemingly endless waves of enemies. Of course, as you progress through the game's 15 levels, you'll pick up both offensive and defensive power-ups. It's a tried-and-true formula, and though the game is reasonably responsive, your weapons are both overly powerful and overly plentiful, and there are never enough enemies coming at you at once to give the sense that the odds are even remotely stacked against you.
Astroblasters looks about as run-of-the-mill as it plays. The visuals are a little stitched together, especially the detached explosion effects, but there are enough nice touches, such as some heavy parallax scrolling effects and subtle ship animations, to help compensate. The game's sound is a bit more threadbare, with repetitive weapon effects and a severely underplayed synthesized soundtrack. Even more unfortunate is a sound bug that causes the audio to pop on occasion. Most of these problems would be easily forgiven if Astroblasters were just a bit more challenging.
