Steel Storm: Burning Retribution Review

Every now and again, a game is released that shuns most of the complexity you find in 'triple A' titles today in favour of good old simple fun. Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is one of those games.

Created by indie developer Kot-In-Action Creative Artel, Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is a pretty basic, top down shoot em' up. You are in control of a plane and you shoot things. Lots and lots of things as you work towards set objectives within the level.

These objectives mostly involve you shooting many more things in order to fulfil them, for example, missions will include: destroying ammo crates, destroying supply crates, destroying cooling pipes, destroying a boss enemy and so on. The way forward for these objectives however isn't always as linear as you would expect them to be, you often have to double back on yourself and hunt around for ways to open force fields and overcome other barriers before you can get to the levels exit.

The vast majority of the time, however, will be spent with your finger firmly on the trigger gunning down all in your way. The difficulty seems to rest quite nicely somewhere between challenging and bullet-hell style overwhelming. The AI actually seems to be pretty clever too, taking cover behind objects and weaving in and around in a similar way that you do to avoid being hit and maximize the area of which their bullets hit.

Along the way there are a couple of different weapons you can pick up to make light work of your opponents such as rockets, but be on your guard once you pick them up because if you are killed with them in your possession, you loose them for the duration of that level. They don't re-spawn when you do which does make you step back and think about your approach to some enemies rather than just charge on in there, all guns blazing.

There are also many different coloured crystals to collect throughout the levels, while these give you no physical reward for grabbing them, they do increase your score which makes me feel like I'm stood in an arcade, chucking money into a machine trying to get nothing more than the best score on the leaderboard which is in no way a bad thing.

Steel Storm: Burning Retribution consists of two episodes, each one involving a series of missions of different lengths and difficulties. Some of these missions lack variety and it can seem like you are playing on the same map you did two missions ago, which can make things feel repetitive fairly quickly. The episodes themselves however are fairly lengthy so you do get a nice amount of play time in single player mode.  On top of the single player campaign, you also get a fairly robust multi-player game too, with co-op gameplay and the usual capture the flag and deathmatch modes, all of which can support up to 16 players which makes for some especially intense deathmatch games!

There are also various challenges to complete and unlockables to earn to change the way the game plays for you, for example there is an unlockable first person mode hidden within the second episode which makes things rather interesting.

The control method for Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is very easy to use, your movement is the traditional WASD buttons, your main weapon fires from left mouse button and your secondary weapon from the right mouse button. If you aren't used to using keyboard and mouse for your shoot em' ups however, you can plug your Xbox controller in and use that instead. After trying both, I personally found that the keyboard and mouse was easier to use as it gave you far better control of which direction you were actually shooting from.

Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is an incredibly simple title, if you feel in the mood for some no strings attached destruction then it is definitely a game to consider; its simplicity makes it all the more fun. For the price of the game however (£3.99 on Steam) you do get a lot for your money, while not bringing forth any new innovations to the genre it does bring the potential for a good couple of hours fun, which is sometimes, all you are after.