A frantic, explosive action game where you must defend the inner space of a rotatable shape, Pixel Soldier is fast, hard fun.
Pixel Soldier, from Accidentally Awesome, challenges you to move around within an object, defeating enemies and avoiding traps and bullets as you attempt to survive wave after wave. In many ways it is an arcade platform game meets shoot ’em up, however it all takes place in a single screen with the character almost staying static due to the rotation of the level to match your movements. This creates an interesting feeling of movement which makes everything feel fast and intense.
Enemies attack thick and fast, and there’s also a decent selection of bosses including some you need to anchor or dash through, to strike. There’s a wide selection of weapons available and, due to the fact that you are climbing walls in the game, a lot of them work cleverly when it comes to direction. Oh, I forgot to mention, you have a wall-jumping surge move as well — you can quickly sling yourself from wall to wall, which combines well with some of the more interesting weapons.
I played through quite a few waves and a couple of bosses when I played Pixel Soldier earlier in the year at Pocket Gamer Connects. It was a lot of fun and felt perfect for both mobile and Nintendo Switch platforms. I had to actually be dragged away from the game to go and get lunch and probably would have spent a fair bit longer lost in its retro-inspired bullet hell if I hadn’t had more to do.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Pixel Soldier is the name, it’s really quite underwhelming considering how explosive and fun the game is. Maybe my opinion on the name is unnecessarily harsh, but I feel that what I played was exceptional while the name is quite forgettable and generic.
To quickly return to discussing the visuals, it features four different palettes. Each of them capture the Game Boy vibe that inspired its creation way back in the GBJAM 5 two years ago.
A build of Pixel Soldier is free to play for PC over on their Itch.io page. I hope they release for mobile and Nintendo Switch in future.
