Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate is a twin-stick shooter game available for download from the PlayStation Store for the PS4 and PS Vita. Double Eleven have brought PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate to the PS4 and PlayStation Vita; you have most likely heard of Double Eleven as they have a great pedigree of their own with such great games as LIMBO, PixelJunk Monsters Ultimate HD, Frozen Synapse Tactics and most notably of all Little Big Planet PS Vita.

PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate is a bundle of what are highly regarded as two of the best indie games from the PS3 in the form of PixelJunk Shooter 1 and 2. The game itself spans across six episodes comprising of five stages per episode with a boss battle providing the final act to each episode, although you cannot progress onto any of the levels from PixelJunk Shooter 2 until you have completed all three episodes from the first game.

Your journey is given a true purpose as you have to rescue scientists and unique scientists along the way, while collecting diamonds has added importance as the diamonds are required in exchange for passage through to the next stage. This is a great design choice as it places a greater emphasis on the diamonds and the exploration required in order to collect them, rather than it being portrayed as being greedy and selfish or an afterthought to look for diamonds when scientists and unique scientists need to be rescued from certain death; as each stage requires a particular amount of diamonds to be found and collected before you can progress onto any of the surrounding stages in any given episode, which means that if you were not to collect the diamonds, then the scientists and unique scientists would die a perilous death as a consequence of you not being able to gain access to that stage to save them. You are effectively rewarded for rescuing scientists as they provide gameplay tips, while the unique scientists provide a background story regarding how they found themselves stationed within that particular area.

The gallery mode allows you to revisit the back story of the game as explained from the unique scientists you have saved at any given time from the main menu, which is a rather handy feature as you can go back and read through the back story to the game in chronological order when you have completed all six episodes and rescued all of the unique scientists throughout the entire game.

The principle rules of PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate are pretty simple, but if you do not follow them precisely, then you may find it tough to progress through all of the levels within a stage. A perfect example of this is when you are rescuing scientists and unique scientists; as they can be killed with a single stray bullet from your ship when shooting at an enemy or even at rock they have been buried under, which results in a casualty being added to your casualty counter on the bottom right of the HUD and when your casualty counter is full, it is game over and you will have to return to the start of the level with a more cautious approach. However, you can reduce your casualty counter by one by collecting 1ups to provide you with an additional life; you will find a 1up randomly here or there, but you can earn a 1up, shield or score booster as a reward for collecting 200 star coins that are littered around the environments and are also produced when you have destroyed an enemy.

The condition of your ship is of the utmost importance as if it is destroyed, then the chances of rescuing all of the scientists and unique scientists will be destroyed too. You have to remain cautious as your ship is susceptible to the elements, such as continued exposure to hot molten lava being enough to make your ship overheat and combust.

The level design has a tremendous amount of variation with lots of unique environments. You will uncover new suits that will provide new abilities for your ship with a total of six suits to experience that each provide a total shift in gameplay mechanics, such as the magma suit, which allows you to grapple rocks and adding a lava magma weapon for your ship to remove walls of ice by spraying streams of magma; therefore enabling you to reach areas in levels that you would not be able to do so if not for the suits providing powerful new upgrades to your ship in order for you to navigate through the varying environments that you will encounter throughout the game. This is a great design choice as it really varies the level design when you consider that scientists, unique scientists and diamonds could be behind a wall of ice, so you really have to adapt to the change in environment and learn how and when to spray streams of magma without risking the temperature or safety of your ship or the scientists and unique scientists for that matter too.

There are various elements to the level design that are added in layers as you progress through the game, such as switches that need to be pulled to open new paths; fluid balls consist of a fluid-filled vegetation; fluid slugs that suck up pools of liquid to pour onto another area of the level, such as collecting a pool of water to extinguish the heat of the molten lava magma; fluid hoses that are reminiscent of fluid slugs, but instead produce the liquid contained within them instantaneously in a rather uncontrollable fashion as soon as they are at full capacity; and glowing orbs that are perfect for the darkest of extremely dark areas as they provide illumination to the surrounding environments.

The enemy design has a pretty good scale of variety including: bats that will attempt to swoop upon your ship; turrets that will fire upon your ship; spinners that will awaken from the rock they are embedded within to ambush your ship when you have manoeuvred your ship within striking distance; pools of erupting molten lava that will use the heat of the magma to overheat your ship to boiling point, while the molten lava is usually located within a crevice, it is also capable of erupting at random when you have progressed a certain length into particular levels, resulting in very limited time to rescue the remaining scientists and unique scientists and as many of the remaining diamonds as you can collect before making it to the exit as quickly as possible; alongside turrets and birds the will attempt to fire magma at your ship; boss fights that close out each episode with an amazing amount of variation to how each boss looks, moves and attacks your ship; and much more besides. The enemy design gradually transforms as you progress through the game to keep the enemies and surrounding environmental hazards looking fresh and exciting, while retaining the appropriate pacing to make the enemies and environmental hazards as challenging with each passing stage.

Points are quite important if you want to earn a higher position on the global rankings amongst the elite PixelJunk Shooter players. Points can be scored by collecting star coins with ten points awarded for bronze, 100 points for silver and 500 points for gold, while collecting extras, such as a 1up will earn 1,000 points, a score booster will award 1,000 points and rescuing a surviving scientist or unique scientist will also earn 1,000 points. It is vital to also be aware of a few more factors when attempting to earn high scores, such as the combo meter measures how many enemies you have killed within a short period of time to accumulate a high scoring combo and the score attack display, which will display the current and best scores for each stage, while a speed bonus is awarded for each stage with a faster time resulting in a higher speed bonus and the stage score, which is amassed from your general performance within the stage is combined together with the speed bonus to form the overall score to be submitted to the global rankings.

PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate supports cross-buy and cross-save between the Vita and PS4. Cross-buy presents a superb amount of value as it means that you will be purchasing the Vita and PS4 versions of the game with just a single purchase. The cross-save functionality allows you to sync the progression of your save file from your Vita to your PS4 and vice versa, so you can start playing the game on your Vita on the way to and from work, sync your save game when you return home and then resume were you left off by loading the save game and continuing via the PS4 version. The cross-save feature is made possible by uploading your save file to the cloud on one console and downloading it from the other console.

PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate supports the share feature that allows you to upload a video clip to Facebook or Twitter; upload a screen shot to Facebook or Twitter; and broadcast live gameplay footage via Twitch or Ustream as you are experiencing the game with a simple tap of the share button and selecting the option of your choice. The PS4’s hard-drive continuously stores your most recent fifteen minutes of gameplay footage, so you still have the chance to decide if you would like to share something amazing a few minutes after it has taken place. The share feature is a next-gen revolution that will only continue to prosper and flourish as it matures with additional features and further experimentation.

The controls are well mapped to the DualShock 4’s face buttons and are quite simplistic in their approach. The control scheme consists of pressing R1 or R2 to fire weaponry such as homing missiles; pressing L1 or L2 to use the grappling hook to rescue scientists and unique scientists as well as collecting diamonds, weapon pick-ups and health pick-ups; pressing X to perform a super spin; changing the direction of the left analogue stick to manoeuvre your ship; changing the direction of the right analogue stick to aim your weaponry; alternating the direction of the right analogue stick to perform a more controlled super spin that is aimed to collect star coins, rather than as an attack to destroy enemies; holding both analogue sticks in the same direction to increase your ship’s speed, which can particularly useful when attempting to avoid your ship overheating; pressing the share button takes you to the share feature menu; and pressing the options button to display the pause menu.

There is light bar implementation, which changes the colour of the light to match the colour of the ship, while the DualShock 4 controller has perfectly calibrated vibration that makes the controller vibrate anytime your ship collides with an object or enemy; when your ship is shot by an enemy or as the water splashes in reaction to your ship entering the water. Unfortunately, there is no touch pad implementation, which is a surprise as it could have provided an alternative method for aiming with a gentle movement of a finger over the surface of the touch pad and a tap of the touch pad as an alternative for firing your weaponry, while there is also no gyroscopic motion sensing functionality, which could have been an optional method of steering the ship and even tilting the DualShock 4 back and forth quickly could have been used as an alternative to executing a well timed super spin.

The performance on PS4 has naturally improved to 1080p native resolution graphics and 60 frames per second, but beyond that you can immediately tell that care and attention has been invested into improving the visual quality in comparison to the original PS3 versions with significant improvements to lighting, shadows and particle effects to such a point that the ship has been re-designed with lights to illuminate darker areas of scenery with particle effects shimmering in the light and considering the original PS3 versions looked great as they were; PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate has really taken the graphical quality to an entirely new level. A special mention must be made for the intricate optimisation required for the PlayStation Vita version that started out initially at only three frames per second, but was not rushed at the expense of quality and was perfected to a smooth thirty frames per second.

The presentation of the game is solid with a great user interface across various menus such as the main menu, adventure mode menu, gallery menu, online battle menu, global rankings, how to play menu, options menu and gameplay menus with support for navigation via the left analogue stick, directional pad and face buttons, although it does not include support for navigation via the right analogue stick and touch pad, although that is not an issue considering the other methods of navigation that are available. The background of the menu screens are bright and colourful and after a minute or so of inactivity from the main menu; you will be taken for a tour around randomly selected levels that really shows off the graphical fidelity.

The audio consists of sound effects and music with the sound effects consisting of the movement of your ship; your ship’s range of weaponry being fired; enemies firing their weaponry; explosions; water splashing; volcanic lava erupting, alongside incidental sound effects, such as rescuing scientists and unique scientists and collecting diamonds, while the music sounds great and is quite experimental in its genre with different tracks being played during gameplay, in between gameplay and during menus. Unfortunately, there is no support for the DualShock 4 speaker, which is surprising as it could have been used to produce any of the main or incidental sound effects or perhaps even the soundtrack to the game.

The trophy list includes twenty-seven trophies with ten bronze trophies, nine silver trophies, seven gold trophies and one platinum trophy. The two easiest trophies have to be the Double Eleven bronze trophy for playing the game at 11:11am, which can be earned rather easily by adjusting the system clock to 11:11am followed by actively playing the game as if you just remain on the main menu, then it will not work; alongside the A Chamber Of Secrets bronze trophy for finding your first secret area with the first chance arising within the second level of the first stage of the first episode called Into The Abyss. There are five online trophies of varying difficulties as you are required to win five online League Battles in order to earn the Smoke Me A Kipper, I’ll Be Back For Breakfast gold trophy and in the process earning the Fight For That Inch bronze trophy for winning your first League Battle, while there are easier online trophies, such as the One Small Step bronze trophy for purchasing an item in Online Battle. The majority of the trophy list consists of some rather hard trophies, such as the six trophies for defeating the boss at the end of each episode; the My Precious silver trophy for collecting all of the hidden treasure within an episode; the Come With Me If You Want To Live silver trophy for rescuing all of the scientists within an episode; the Ah, What A Day For Science gold trophy for rescuing all of the scientists throughout the entire game; the No Stone Unturned silver trophy for finding all of the secret areas within an episode and the Cave Of Wonders gold trophy for finding every secret area throughout the entire game, which are hard trophies due to the amount of exploration required; and the If You Are Going Through Hell, Keep Going silver trophy for completing the secret level called The Road To Dawn, which can be unlocked by finding all of the collectibles across the entire game. Depending upon skill and a good trophy guide to provide some helpful tips with the locations of the secret areas, scientists and diamonds that it would take between ten to fifteen hours to platinum the trophy list.

There are no difficulty levels, but the difficulty naturally increases as you progress through each level of each stage with each episode introducing new elements of gameplay, so that there is always something new to adapt to across all six episodes, while the scientists, unique scientists and diamonds will be positioned in increasingly difficult to find areas with more and more even being hidden in amongst harder to find secret areas. There is a boss at the end of each episode that you must defeat before being able to progress onto the next episode with each boss having their own varying tactics and approaches to attacking your ship, which will always keep you guessing to what is about to come next in each of the six boss battles and certainly adds another difficulty curve to the gameplay.

The online multiplayer game modes includes League Battles and Friend Battles with the rules consisting of each player having their opportunity to be on the offence by guiding Survivor Capsules to your area and avoiding detection from your opponent, although when on defensive duties; you can no longer grab any Survivor Capsules as your soul aim becomes to prevent your opponent from scoring points by finding and destroying them. Your field of vision is increased during your defensive period as you are equipped with a radar system you can use to track the positioning of your opponent. Each turn plays out as a set of offensive and defensive plays and in the case of a player’s ship being destroyed during an offensive play; a ship icon will be left behind, while in the given scenario that the defensive player collects the ship icon the offensive and defensive duties of each player will effectively be reversed. Another interesting twist to the rules of the League Battles and Friend Battles is if the scores are level after each player has taken their two turns, then each player will have one additional turn in an attempt to avoid a draw, although in the situation that scores are still level after extra time, then the battle is classed as a draw.

Amongst the progression system of the leagues; there are some more interesting features to the online multiplayer, such as twenty items that are unique to the online game modes with a maximum of three available for selection to attach to your ship for each battle, which are split into four separate categories including: weapons, power-ups, disrupters and hazards; successfully diversifying the gameplay mechanics of the online modes from the single player and local co-operative multiplayer experiences. Another feature of interest is the money earned depending upon how well you have performed during the battle and how that initially enables you to purchase items, but how it also allows you to bet the points you have earned when you have reached the Saturn League, which can potentially earn you huge points boosts to progress you further through the leagues.

However, it would have good to have seen the online multiplayer available in the form of local multiplayer game modes as the online multiplayer features show genuine promise, but suffer from rather inconsistent online servers, which can be somewhat temperamental in recurrent circumstances not allowing you to connect to a friend you have invited into a game or even preventing you from joining their game from an invitation that has been sent to you. The saving grace in regards to having some form of local competitive multiplayer comes in the form of cross-play multiplayer for the League Battles, which allows one player to play on the PS4 and another on the Vita and both players therefore having a full screen on their respective consoles.

PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate includes local co-operative multiplayer, which I must say is great to see considering how many games do not contain any form of local multiplayer, although it does have its limitations as there are no friendly fire options, so it is purely co-operative and the fact that you are both confined to the same screen, which causes a problem as if a player has not moved as quickly as they should do so, then the other player will not be able to see what is right next to them in the appropriate direction, which could potentially result in that player being shot at rather unexpectedly from an enemy that you cannot actually see. It would have also been good to see the local co-operative multiplayer be available in the form of online co-operative multiplayer; just to provide that customary freedom for players to be able to play the single player experience locally with a friend or online with a friend and perhaps even in single player with the option of the game being open for anyone from your friends’ list or globally to join in co-operatively to help each other past a difficult area or boss in the game.

The online leaderboards focuses on global rankings, your personal score and your friends’ scores, while also covering everything in single player and co-operative with each leaderboard containing each player’s rank; name (PSN ID); nationality; score; and the amount of diamonds you have collected with the positioning of each player based upon their overall amount of points. While using the overall points totals is a great way of measuring the positions of the leaderboards; it could be argued that there should have been separate sets of leaderboards with such variations of measuring the positioning of the leaderboards by the best times set by each player for each level, stage and episode of the game, while another possibility would have been to filter by the amount of diamonds that have been collected with a surprise omission being the number of scientists and unique scientists rescued, which would have also made for two more great methods of measuring the positioning of the online leaderboards.

There is plenty of re-playability considering that it contains all of the levels, stages and episodes from both of the original PixelJunk Shooter games from PS3 combined together, while the local co-operative multiplayer allows you to experience the entire game with a friend locally, cross-play multiplayer between PS4 and Vita and the cross-save component certainly allows you the freedom to take the journey of PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate with you between the PS4 and Vita to make it a go-to game in single player.

Overall, when both PixelJunk Shooter games made their debuts on PS3; it should be genuinely believed that they could not be bettered within the twin-stick shooter genre, however Double Eleven has achieved just that as PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate on PS4 and Vita has retained the perfect balancing of fun, addictive and challenging gameplay that made both PixelJunk Shooter games; two of the best indie games on PS3 and then built upon that with improved graphics and performance. If you are a fan of the twin-stick shooter genre, then PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate is certainly for you, especially considering the amazing breadth of content brought together from both of the highly rated PS3 games for an exceptional amount of value with the native PS4 and Vita versions available for a cross-buy purchase of £9.49 with cross-save and cross-play multiplayer implementation, which collectively makes PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate an absolute instant must-buy purchase.

Jason Bonnar

Analysis

• Title: PixelJunk Shooter Ultimate
• Developer: Double Eleven (PS4 and PS Vita Versions)/Q-Games (PS3 Games)
• Publisher: Double Eleven
• System: PS4
• Format: PSN Download
• Cross-Buy: Yes (PS4 and PS Vita)
• Cross-Play: Yes (PS4 vs. PS Vita in League Battles and Cross-Save)
• Multiplayer: 2 Players (Local Co-Operative)/2 Players (Online League Battles)
• Hard Drive Space Required: 482MB