TGS '07: Omega Five Hands-On

Side-scrolling shooters are still alive and well, as games like Omega Five would seem to prove. This beautiful game from developer Natsume should be an exciting entry in the genre when it arrives on Xbox Live Arcade.

The demo version of the game at Microsoft's TGS booth didn't offer up much about the game's backstory, but we can report that it offers you two playable characters who appear to be fighting against a robotic army. These characters, one male and one female, appear quite large on the screen as a complement to the enemies, who themselves are fairly large as well, an effect that gives the game's characters a lot of personality when compared to the normally tiny ships and enemies of your typical shoot-'em-up game. One other welcome aspect of the game was the introduction of a health bar, which allows your character to take a few hits before dying, as opposed to the one-hit deaths that typify the genre. In other words, you're allowed a couple of mistakes before you need to begin again.

Apart from that, the game plays just like you would probably expect from a shooter. You control your character with the right analog stick, and despite the fact that your characters are demonstrably human, they appear to be able to float and fly around the screen. They also have some unique weapons, which are by default fired continuously by moving the left analog stick in any given direction. Using these basic tools, you can dish out quite a bit of destruction. That's a good thing, too, because most enemies will require multiple hits in order to be destroyed. The game seems to take a "quality over quantity" approach here; there aren't huge numbers of enemies coming at you, but you'll need to hit most of them more than once in order to destroy them.

Luckily, you'll have a periodic chance to gain power-ups by breaking open metallic cases that are dropped by enemies. These add-ons range from simple firepower upgrades to rate-of-fire increases that can turn your weapon into a solid laser beam, which seems to be much more useful than the default plasma beam that you begin with.

Although it's difficult to get too specific about Omega Five, given the short length of the demo and the language barriers, it seems as if the game will be a worthy addition to any shoot-'em-up fan's gaming library, especially because it'll come out at XBLA prices. Stay tuned to GameSpot for more details on the game as they become available.