Friendly Necro vs. the Dub Wars

Back in December 2016 I was on vacation for a bit and purchased myself a Christmas gift from Steam's discount aisle. Do you ever just see a game and think, oh yeah, that's something I'd probably like? Dub Wars was one of those purchases that just kind of checked all the right boxes from the get go . . . dubstep (check).  What?  You thought there would be more check boxes than dubstep? (Actually a lot of the music isn't really pure dubstep, but I digress, and it doesn't matter -- great music is great music.)

Honestly I'm not really a 2-D, top down, shooter kind of a guy; although as I was playing the game I kept thinking to myself, I wonder if Mark Bussler from Classic Gameroom has tried this game? He's totally a 2-D, top down shooter kind of a guy. He lives for this kind of game. Then again, I don't know if he's an electronic music loving type of a dude.

Anyway, the thing that makes this game different is that you don't fire the gun, the music fires the gun, which makes for a very "non-mashy" experience where you just move your ship around and aim your weapons as you visually see the music fire off beautiful lasers of death.

The tempo of the game naturally moves along with the tempo of the music, and when you hear the bass drop is the same moment where you are wrecking enemies with your most powerful weapons fired off in rapid succession. It's actually the quiet moments in the game that can be the most stressful as your weapons are just firing occasionally and you're running away from things thinking, can this song just drop the bass already?

At first when I bought this game I was thinking, this would be super fun to stream, but I did a test video of me playing and it was pretty funny how focused I was at dodging. Just look at this face:

Later in the video it doesn't change much.

Yeah!  I don't think I even moved my head to the music lol.

So I don't know about streaming this game, but it might be a different experience with an audience to react to and entertain.  I kind of turn into a different person when I stream.  :)

The game suffers a touch from replayability problems. There are 10 levels (songs), and while the music is absolutely great, it's 10 songs that you hear over and over. Did I say playing over and over? You end up playing levels over and over a lot to power up your ship, and this is because the first time you enter a level, you will get wrecked -- power ups help so much with surviving.

You play games over and over and collect "wubs," which are then spent to improve your health and weapons.  Probably the coolest part of this feature is that your weapons can get massively upgraded and not only become more powerful, more more outlandish . . . whereas you can have little exhaust lasers shooting out of your side at 0 wubs, 1000 wubs will sometimes cause those exhaust lasers to become giant lightsabers of death, which is fun.

There are over 40 achievements to earn, which help replayability, but some achievements are like . . . really? That's crazy. Who would do that? *cough* I may or may not have the achievement for playing a level 25 times in a row. *cough* I may have just boosted my health up and put myself in the corner of the screen and walked away from the game to do that.

So there you have it.  Dub Wars!  Pretty fun little game, and a pretty great discount rack buy for me over Christmas.

Happy Dueling!