Saturn Icarus Demo

Certain games have managed to leave such a deep mark on the industry that they are now considered the main source of inspiration for entire genres. Doom did this for the FPS genre, because everything else evolved from that simple technology used to emulate the first-person perspective. On the other hand, everything that came after Doom also shaped the genre into what it is today, not to mention the fact that it’s still evolving and changing.

Saturn Icarus is a retro first-person shooter that aims to emulate the old classics, although that’s a pretty easy thing to do nowadays with our current technology. Obviously, it’s great that independent developers have the tools to do this, but it’s also true that such projects do not really propel the genre further nor change it in any way. Granted, this is not true for every release, but it’s difficult to be excited about something that was perfected two decades ago.

As such, the game at hand is a classic first-person shooter in which your only goal is to kill enemies and clear the level as quickly as possible. There’s no time limit, so you can take as much as you want, but there are a couple of other annoyances. The first one of them is that you have only one pistol at your disposal, and the levels are very small and unimpressive.

Even the way you pick ammunition is pretty annoying, given the fact that you have to press a specific key while you are over it in order to take it. It would be much easier if you could just automatically pick it up by walking over it, as it’s the case with every other FPS out there. Not only that, but it’s that much more annoying when you consider the fact that the vertical look axis is locked, so you have to guess when you are over the ammunition.

The retro graphics are not a problem in most cases, but they don’t impress at all in Saturn Icarus, mainly because of the level design. As such, there’s nothing to see throughout the few available stages, except for the walls and the occasional enemy. It’s boring to walk around empty rooms and just shoot badly coded AIs, so the game certainly needs a lot more work before it can be released even as a demo.

Saturn Icarus is not yet ready for criticism, but that’s not to say that the game won’t turn out great in the end. However, the developer should have worked a bit more on it before releasing it to the public, because few are going to be patient enough to see the whole thing now.