Great design at its simplest, Everyday Shooter is a blast from beginning to end.
Cons: Not a whole lot of content included; Controls aren't quite as precise as necessary
Listen up game designers, this is how you do it. Everyday Shooter is simply awesome and awesomely simple. Without doing anything particularly complicated, Everyday Shooter manages to hit all the right notes while it lasts.
Everyday Shooter is a twin-stick shooter. You move with the arrow keys and shoot with WASD (unless you customize the controls otherwise; unfortunately you cannot fine tune them to be more precise). However, that's about where the game stops being ordinary, or "everyday."
Even though you may never use any controls other than move and shoot, Everyday Shooter still shows remarkable depth and variety. Instead of giving you points for killing enemies for surviving as long as you can, Everyday Shooter challenges you to pick up white blocks. The way you earn these blocks varies greatly across the game's seven wildly different levels. In one level you might earn them by setting off explosions that catch groups of enemies; in another you may shoot attached enemies to start a chain reaction. Each level keeps things fresh with a gameplay twist, and by and large the game succeeds for it.
To discover each twist you need to watch the visuals closely, which themselves also play into the game's favor. Everyday Shooter has an abstract style, with graphics largely composed of simple shapes, and unrelated imagery like robots, eyes, and planes. The styles capture a remarkable variety of tones, always creating for an exciting sense of discovery on each level.
The way music works is even better. In each level of Everyday Shooter a guitar plays a simple riff in the background. As you shoot things, cause chains, etc. new guitar sounds are layered on top. When you succeed at creating large combos, it feels like an arrhythmic guitar symphony is playing along to your actions, and it's just sublime.
Of course, there naturally must be a downside to all this: there's just not much of Everyday Shooter. Initially the game seems large, since you have to start from the beginning each time you get a game over (which is frequent when you're learning the ropes-make no mistake, Everyday shooter is hard). However, you are able to progress further as you learn the mechanics and purchase more starting lives; once you purchase a few starting lives to make things easier, you'll find that the game barely takes a couple hours to beat entirely. Sure, there's plenty of incentive to replay the levels a few times to shoot for scores, but all things considered, Everyday Shooter doesn't have much to offer.
However, this is largely irrelevant, because this game is worth your time anyway. It's a simple joy, a remarkable case of pure, rock solid, game design, and it's definitely a good purchase if you believe in quality over quantity.