For a premise as tense as piloting an airship to save humanity from mysterious alien races this game sure is all talk!
In 0 Day you do not have an identity and there isn't any narrative of any kind, but you're an aircraft pilot who will protect New York, Tokyo, and then Paris from a number of alien races who are attacking these territories. The way you will do this however is not complicated, challenging, or creative, and you will feel minimal accomplishment once you are done. Ironic? Yes, it definitely is. Now onto the review.
---- Gameplay/Controls:
The controls are very simple: left stick is to move, right stick is to directional shooting, LB is to boost, and RB is to bomb drop. You may move 360 degrees and will fight on an arena stylized like Geometry Wars', only with the camera pointing directly down at your aircraft.
As for gameplay there are three levels: New York, Tokyo, and Paris. Each of these levels consist of what the game calls "Days", which are short segments where you will need to take down a certain colossal enemy-called a Target--either once or five times depending on what Day you are in. Every level has seven Days, but every Day is no different than any other Day in that level and you only face a copy and paste job Target enemy up until the seventh Day, where you will end the level by fighting an equally uninspired and practically functionless boss.
----- Sound/Music:
The game has relatively three soundtracks at most: one for the three levels, one for the completion screen, and one for the menu screen.
The sounds will vary from a scream echoed by one of the three Target enemies outside of the three bosses, some gibberish communication on your make believe intercom radio, and a few sound effects relative to your fire and enemy fire.
----- Graphics:
0 Day uses a somewhat impressive engine in this regard as some enemies will have a good texture job and their movements will be in a natural rhythm. But the three level environments ultimately look bland since the camera is at such an ugly vantage point that it shows everything as mirrored building after building with texture.
---- Achievements/Replay Value:
The achievements will range from completing the final level on either Normal or Hard or killing 10 of a certain enemy to killing yourself 256 times, earning every meaningless rank, or beating the game without losing a life. Uncreative achievements aside, there are three online modes of play: Co-op, Capture the Flag, or Control Point, but the online server will not be supported by enough players to have at it with these modes.
Now, to categorize some hard facts about the game for quick peer review I will list them below under Pros or under Cons:
The Pros:
* Out of the three bosses, the first boss had three attacks rather than just one, and gave the game a brief moment of challenge
* The texture jobs on the enemies is pretty good for an Arcade title
* A few of the enemies displayed some creativity: one was a mosquito to drain your life and another a 'sandwicher' to instant kill you.
The Cons:
* The gameplay is very, very simple and it's very, very repetitious
* The game bases itself around a meaningless rank system that can only encourage regular players to dislike the game more when they see themselves needlessly demoted or their rank go up with no bonus
* Co-op play is broken and punishes you for trying to get through the game with your friends by restarting your progress and demoting you when you can't live up to it's bad programming job
* The enemies are uninspired, have no personality, and usually never have anything more than just one attack, even among bosses
* The AI is so terrible your friends will run into walls, shoot at nothing, and enemies will occasionally forget about you
* The level designs are incomprehensible without titles
* There are no secondary objectives nor challenge
* The two online versus modes are essentially tag play since the game is too shallow to support a learning curve. That and of course you're not going to be playing co-op or online versus once each individual player becomes aware of this
* The game gives you the ability to choose from multiple ships and read their attack pattern descriptions before going out into combat and customizing the colors of those ships, but each of the four unlockable ships of the eight available ships are clones of the original four, and the first two ships of the full eight are better than every other ship, giving you no reason to use anything else available.
* By the developers not setting a narrative as a player you don't feel any sense of accomplishment, conviction, or confidence in the game's production value, and you will realize the premise they chose was just a giant opportunity to show that they were pretentious at best.
* Outside of there being no challenge, no secondary objectives or changing circumstances, or depth to the gameplay, the powerups are all there is, but they don't even accommodate the problem, have the mere function of evolving your attack pattern per se, but even hurt, in such a regard, a few of the ship types in terms of their damage efficiency.
* The music is bland and few, making it a forgettable and unhelpful factor.
* You only have so much time to complete a stage, but the objectives never change, giving you an annoying sense of urgency.
* By combining the game's problems with a light take on the bullet hell genre, the developers are potentially hurting the sales margins of true bullet hell video games and implying the standard should be lowered in that genre only to hurt the genre further.
----- Conclusion:
0 Day is basically the kind of game that implies that it's original and high budget by using a powerful premise until the gameplay comes into the picture as a factor. If you are into bullet h*ll games or arena shooters and do not have low standards you will frown at this game's many plunders, so please save yourself $15 to help the game industry by not buying this. A 4/10 is my rating.