Travel the surface of large horizontally-scrolling platforms, and pit your highly maneuverable craft against hoards of enemies eager to blow you to bits, eat you or worse. An evolution of PomPom's 2001 award winning game, Space Tripper. You buy this $5 USD gem to play an old game with a coat of fresh paint, and it’s a purchase well worth making.Astro Tripper is a furious shoot-em-up experience inspired by the painful, knuckle busting video games of years gone by. Let’s be honest here though: you don’t buy a game like Astro Tripper to impress your friends. It’s hard to pinpoint anything “wrong” with the presentation, but nothing is all that noteworthy or impressive either. Astro Tripper certainly retains that evocative old-school feel, but it still feels a bit lacking. Visually, the game is less than stunning, though it’s not poor by any means. Ultimately, perseverance pays off – it’s just a matter of patience. Then again, it’s supremely satisfying to finally clear a world after getting mowed down by a Big Boss time and time again. One touch from anything - and there’s a whole lot of ‘anything’ on-screen - and you’re toast. If you’re not inherently skilled at old-school shooters, then you’re bound to experience some frustration when you’re coming to grips with each level. The harsh difficulty is a two-way street. Enemies are everywhere, and the stringent timer makes boss encounters much more difficult than you’d expect. There’s no shame in beginning on Easy when it comes to this game.

It’s all pretty self-explanatory after a few minutes in the game.ĭespite its simplicity, Astro Tripper is devilishly hard. The controls are incredibly basic, but extremely tight either analog stick steers the ship, X fires, Square switches weapons, and Circle flips the ship left or right (you face one of the two directions the entire time). Your ship is equipped with two weapons: a blue power laser and a red spread weapon very simple, very functional. The levels are viewed from a top-down perspective, but some contain vertical hills and slopes which have a minor effect on gameplay. Astro Tripper finds its niche in utter simplicity.

You see, Astro Tripper is not another ‘dual-stick’ shooter like Blast Factor or Super Stardust HD, nor is it a free-flying experience like NovaStrike. Yet, despite its wealth of competitors, PomPom Games’ Astro Tripper manages to stand out from the crowd with its retro, healthily streamlined gameplay, not to mention its very affordable price point. Wow, another top-down shooter on the PlayStation Network?! How… unoriginal.

Astro tripper full