Before Truxton Extreme became a thing, I had little experience with the series that started out on the Genesis in the golden days of the shoot ‘em ups, and was later expanded with a sequel, Truxton II. As a casual player of games like Raiden, and with no past knowledge of this particular series, and with no expectations as to what to expect from this new game developed by highly regarded creative Masahiro Yuge from Tatsujin and published by Clear River Games, I came out of it quite impressed with the end result.
While the original games had practically no real backstory to speak of, Truxton Extreme is surprisingly rich in that regard – for an arcade shooter, anyway. You play as a pilot whose essence has been directly transferred to a state-of-the-art spaceship tasked with protecting the planet against an alien threat. All of this (and more) is told via semi-animated comic book panels in between levels, and while cliché, it’s a step WAY above than anyone can demand out of these games.
That also speaks to the sheer variety at play in this third Truxton game. Power-ups do grow exponentially the more that are picked up, as it’s par from the course, but there are a few that radically change the way you play by giving your tiny ship some much needed oomph, depending on the color that happens to spawn as you blast the opposition apart. For instance, the white one gives you weaker homing shots, while green’s vertical barrage can spell doom to just about anything in your way, with other styles of attacks coming in through the rest.
These help give the otherwise pretty standard space shooting gameplay a tad more flavor, allowing you to suit the gameplay to your preferences, or change things up in order to be more capable during a section you might be having some trouble at. Speaking of difficulty, Truxton Extreme is quite friendly in that regard, allowing you to not only change the number of lives and bombs as needed in exchange for not being able to post your score to the leaderboards. That and an even easier experience playing by getting you in through the initial stages with fewer enemies and more punch to your ship before tackling higher difficulties.
Otherwise, Truxton Extreme would match up against some of the better options in the genre, like last year’s Earthion, by taking a similar approach of evoking nostalgia in the form of an otherwise no frills arcade shooting adventure, only now in decent looking – albeit simple – polygonal look. That, coupled with a rocking soundtrack, closes the loop of a game which will likely please shoot ‘em up fiends looking for their next fix.
