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Review

Space Giraffe

5.0

Format Xbox Live Arcade

Developer Llamasoft

Publisher Llamasoft

Genre Shoot 'em Up

20-Sep-2007 Let's go back to your childhood...

Let's have a couple of disclaimers here: our US magazine gave Space Giraffe 2/10 and second we know and like Jeff Minter. However, neither of these things have affected our score for Space Giraffe, Minter's latest opus, which appears to be a reworking of the old arcade classic Tempest.

It's obvious from the off that Space Giraffe is not a modern game. Even the game-culture references are heavy-handed (e.g. "our giraffe is another castle") and a few years out of date. This is a deliberately backwards-looking game made to appeal to hardcore gamers and it's up to you whether the combination of epilepsy-inducing flashes of Jay Allard, long-dead catchphrases and deceptively simple gameplay works. It didn't for us.

We say the gameplay is "deceptively simple", because there's effectively two buttons. Your craft travels sideways along the grid, one button shoots, whilst pulling the trigger pulls you back from the grid so you can shoot enemies that have reached the top of the grid. There's a "power zone" which allows you to combo enemies for higher scores, but we haven't got any idea what it's meant to do beyond that. You've also got smart-bombs, for those desperate moments.

There's definitely tactics to getting higher scores, but beyond grouping enemies together to kill them all at once, we're screwed if we know what they are, having enough trouble getting to grips with the basics of playing the game. In fact, a bigger problem was caring enough - we simply couldn't motivate ourselves to keep playing, because the blaring colours, old gameplay and catchphrases really got on our nerves. Yes, the game works, yes, there's plenty of gameplay for the hardcore in there. We're just not convinced it's either varied enough or interesting enough to lure the casual gamer in.

Dan Griliopoulos