Critical Annihilation

From time to time, small games manage to impress through their simple, but effective mechanics, as well as great replayability and the fun factor. Critical Annihilation is a good example of that, as it was merely designed to be an experiment to test out a voxel illumination engine, but it turned out to be a bit more than that in the end.

The game throws you right into the middle of the action as soon as you execute it and agree to start playing, with no boring intro cutscenes, dialogue or character background story. Instead, you begin as a small guy in the middle of a blocky map, with a gun in his hand and hordes of enemies coming straight for you from all directions, all of which wield guns as well.

Since the controls are about as simple as they can get, you just have to move around and use the left mouse click to fire the regular gun, or the right-click to use the rocket launcher. After you get a certain number of kills, you also get to unlock a powerful special weapon, which is capable of causing immense explosions and take out large numbers of enemies at the same time.

Although the title might look pretty basic at a first sight, it becomes quite clear that it features some very powerful and advanced graphics as soon as you start using the rocket launcher and witness the first explosion. Beside the nice-looking flames, the shadows it causes are very clear and realistic, as well as incredibly smooth, as long as you activate the improved anti-aliasing option.

Moreover, every enemy leaves behind a pool of blood, which, in time, transforms the somewhat small map into a real gore fest, especially after you manage to survive for a few minutes and the bodies start piling up. By activating the “Paint” mode, the blood each foe has a different color, which results in quite the artsy-looking murder spree.

Because Critical Annihilation is still in the development phase, the game is constantly being improved and it certainly lacks a lot of elements in order to become a huge hit. However, the potential is all there and you can definitely have some fun with it until then, especially since there are no time limits and the enemies keep spawning for as long as you can click.