Jamestown

Jamestown is a fun little game for those of you interested in the helicopter attack genre. You know, those 2D overhead games where you must pilot your craft and shoot down all manner of things without actually getting hit yourself. It’s also an interesting game if you’re into early colonial U.S. history, which I’m guessing will probably turn off anyone that is actually interested in helicopter attack games

Assuming you’re still with me, I’ll dive right into the setting. Jamestown takes an old film style approach to telling a different version of the 1600s. Rather than the New World being the Americas, the New World is Mars. Your enemies are the Spanish Conquistador and his allied Martians. The characters you’ll meet and the places you’ll go will be right out of history, with names like John Smith or the lost colony of Roanoke coming up. It’s a fun little thing about the game if you paid attention during your U.S. history class, that is, assuming you’re from a part of the world where you actually took a U.S. history class.

Yep, old film style story telling. Got to love black and white drawn out explanations of what is going on. Kind of like my reviews.

Mechanics wise the game is pretty simple. Make it through a level without burning up your extra lives and continues (when in single player mode), defeat the boss, and you’re golden. However, that sounds a lot easier than it actually is. The game is pretty good about tossing a variety of enemies at you dependent on the level you’re playing, such as swamp creatures that fire off a chain of energy balls or flowers that will explode, setting off other flowers nearby, if you’re not fast enough at taking them out during a mission where you’re looking for the Lost Colony, or squid like Martians rampaging through the cornfields and attacking red coats when you make your entrance. At times you’ll face greater threats than just enemies, as the walls of a Martian temple open and close, creating paths for you to move – or crush you – as you progress, which of course you must, due to that whole screen scrolling thing.

Thankfully you are not defenseless against all of this. There are a total of 4 ships in the base game, with an additional 3 and random ship if you get the Gunpowder, Treason, & Plot DLC. Each ship behaves differently in the way it attacks and its special abilities. For example, the Gunner ship’s unique ability is an independently targetable turret, making it a great choice for strafing sideways, out of your target’s line of fire, while still doing damage yourself. Beam is another good base ship, whose special ability is a massive damaging beam you fire directly in front of you. The DLC ships are a little bit flashier, and include things like the Gunpowder ship, which fires regenerating bombs, or Ghost, which allows you to place a copy of your ship that will deal a good amount of damage both fore and aft of it, though it does drastically limit the damage you can do with your own ship.

Guy Fawkes has his Treason ship, which fires missiles. Not a bad choice, but not my favorite.

While killing things before they kill you is a very good option, you aren’t without a defensive measure. There is a mechanic called vaunt. To use it you must first fill up a gauge with what I’d describe as golden hex nuts (as in nuts and bolts) and gears that your enemies drop upon defeat. You can then vaunt, which creates a temporary shield that will destroy all incoming fire and giving you quite a few points in the process. At that point you’ve got two options. You can either press the vaunt button again for another small period of invulnerability, or you can keep the bar from draining all the way back to zero, which will give you major points the longer you keep it charged, but also prevents you from using the shield again if you want those points.

The points you score during a level become particularly important when you want to purchase new ships or a few other goodies, like the Gauntlet challenge mode, which is playing the entire game on one set of lives, or for acquiring the extremely wacky Farce mode, which replaces all the story intro/outros for levels with something it seems a young child with an overactive imagination would come up with. There are really just two things you can do to increase your score - do better in a level or play at a higher difficulty setting for an increased end of level multiplier.

You'll want to increase your score so you can buy other ships at the store. This is one of my favorites - Gunner. With a separate targeting turret, I can avoid most enemy's fire while still killing them.

There are a total of 5 difficulty levels, but to actually progress in the game you’ll need to pretty quickly step up to the challenge presented by the higher difficulties. That’s because to unlock certain levels you’ll need to have beaten all the proceeding levels on a specific difficulty. This will actually have you replaying most of the levels several times, because there are multiple steps up throughout the short 5 mission game, and if you don’t know that going in, like I didn’t, it will be one of the things that pretty drastically adds to your play time. That, or just generally being bad at the genre, like I am.

Ultimately it’s the shortness of the game that is its most obvious flaw. Graphically, the story the game sets up, all that stuff is fine. If it weren’t for the fact that you’re required to go back and beat the whole game on all but the medium difficulty then you could probably polish it off in 30-40 minutes. Instead it took me 4 hours to get through it, with plenty of time spent struggling to make it through a few of the levels at that high difficulty setting. You could try and extend your play time through multiplayer, up to 4 people locally, which you can do with a controller, keyboard, or mouse, and that does change some of the basic mechanics of the game, such as changing the lives/continue mechanic and making so that once you die the other players must remain alive for a set period of time or grab a certain power up to bring you back to life.

Staying alive can be a difficult task. Using vaunt appropriately can help with that.

All in all, that game isn’t a bad way to spend a bit of your time, though it is something you could end up more than a bit frustrated with as you die one attack cycle away from beating the last boss for the 10th time. I actually picked this up as part of a Humble Bundle back in 2011, but I would recommend you get it for $2.50, as it is so short. You might want to also get the DLC, but it’s not a big deal since it’s just some extra ships. The soundtrack also is a nice little addition, but something I wouldn't go out of my way for. Maybe get the entire package for 75% off at $3.74? As for the game itself, it's a respectable above average experience- 6 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 6/10

Suggested Price: $2.50

*****

For more Jamestown, check out this collection of screenshots otherwise unused in this review. Click any one for a full sized image.