Zamarian Review

"Circle of Doom"

Campaign/Gameplay

Zamarian is an arcade space shooter where you're able to move around this circular space while taking on vast waves of enemies. These enemies are called Zamarian and are striking against humanity, it's up to you to stop them. This is done on a level styled game that runs in waves as you blast away at the wide variety of oncoming enemies. I was quite surprised at all the differing designs for the enemy ships and just the general look of the game as it's fairly decent visually. It's also a nice and relaxing title since you can really just play with the mouse as the game has auto shoot and your only actions are to buy weapon upgrades or ship upgrades. Both of these upgrades do get used up and you'll need to spend the saved up points you get from collecting gems or destroying enemies to buy them. This is basically where the whole concept of lives in the game works as when your coins dwindle so does your ability to buy ship health. As the game is done in a series of levels each features a boss which will take a different strategy to take down each time and the movement across the screen for these larger vessels was very interesting. They did a great job of making a simple game have great three dimensional depth to it with ships appearing at all sorts of angles. This is made even better by the beautiful cosmos that you fly by with all sorts of things going on in the backdrop. The campaign also features a continue option if you'd like to start from the level you died which is nice or you can also start fresh if you choose to.

The Conclusion

Zamarian was actually a really exciting title to try out and great to kill time with. It's a very simple title with minimal movement and even hotkeys to selects items if you don't want to move the mouse over to the sides. The game is also generally colorful and filled with variety from the enemies to the environments you fly over. Definitely a great title to spend time with in bursts and it comes at a great cheap price. I would also like to mention that a multiplayer mode is present though I was unable to access it due to there being no players available when trying a couple times so that's not considered in this review.

Zamarian for PC
Review code provided by Black Shell Media

Rating Overall: 7.5