Heavy Recoil

Heavy Recoil is an arcade sidescroller that aims and succeeds to recreate the look and feel of old-school games. It rocks some pretty nice pixel graphics, simple and fast paced gameplay and an epic soundtrack.

In Heavy Recoil you can play as Matti, Max and Annika, three soldiers with different backgrounds and traits. Each one has different speed, energy, firepower and jumping stats but in fact they dictate the difficulty level.

The energy level represents the number of lives you have. Once you’ve used up all of them it’s game over so you can't really afford to march into battle with Annika who has just one life. You have to be prepared because there will be a lot of projectiles and boss fights coming your way.

Throughout the stages of Heavy Recoil you will find various types of powerups that can enhance your weapon’s damage, provide a secondary grenade attack and even upgrade you with an automated offensive drone. These powerups can be upgraded to a certain level and do considerably more damage.

However, if you lose one life, they reset and you’re back to the default weapon. The game throws large numbers of enemies your way and most of them go down really fast, they’re rather fragile. Although, when they start to pile up and come from all directions, it’s difficult to dodge all the projectiles coming your way.

On a closing note, Heavy Recoil is a great choice for a casual arcade game that actually gives you quite the challenge. It looks good, it’s easy to play and difficult to master and it has one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in a long time for a game of its stature.