Since the dawn of time, humans have been scared of bugs: Big bugs and little ones that can kill you with highly toxic venom or make you into some sort of Spider Man, giant bugs which would roam the 1950s silver screens and seeing Jeff Daniels fight off an army of killer spiders did no favours for kids in the 90’s. So in space, everything is pretty OK, right? Hahaha! Wrong! Guess what, in space its much worse. Their bigger, they breathe fire and they divide when you kill them! Come on guy? OK, so who you going to call when your research center is overrun by nasty balloon shaped bugs? The Bug Butcher of course.
The Bug Butcher is a throwback to the classic arcade games of the late 90’s/ early 2000’s, inspired by renowned titles such as Alien Hominid. The job for our Bug Butcher is clearing out mass infestations of horrifying cute critters within massive research facilities. Players will engage with various waves of enemies over a course of 30 levels through the campaign and also enjoy two separate modes including co-op and a random hoard like mode (which is pretty much the same as the campaign just shorter).
From the get go you can see the inspiration behind the game if you’ve played anything like Alien Hominid before. The Bug Butcher looks wonderfully cartoony and acts even more so with its 2D side-scrolling nature as the design. The effects, coloring and detail of animations feel as though they’ve been pulled right from a professional animation studio. There can be so much joy from simply observing simple actions and interactions within the game world.
The Bug Butcher is a fairly easy game to integrate into; learning the basics and mechanics are no problem. I will advise to play with a joy pad for the more comfortable experience as this game does get crazy. The game gives you enough difficulty options to create a fairly laid back approach or something ridiculously insane. In any case, there is a host of upgrades you can buy to boost your HP, damage, weapon upgrades and power ups too. This can be done by collecting coins that are dropped by fallen enemies and also chaining kills together for a high scores and rewards.
In essence, The Bug Butcher is a solid concept for a small, yet surprisingly thrilling game. I always found games such as Alien Hominid to be extremely taxing and difficult without any good reason. But The Bug Butcher never really spikes the difficulty nor makes you feel cheated out of a life for the most part. However, I will admit some things about the level layouts and behaviors of enemies did make me question the design. Indeed, you’ll come to grips with the world around you and learn behavior patterns of the NPCs, but there are a couple of points I have to bring up; There’s no bold variation with maps and certain levels introduce dynamic interactions which become more of a pain to the flow of the game. There are barriers popping up to block your path once you step on a button (which you can’t avoid or jump over) and only serve to break your combo meter dead. You could try and use it to your advantage but without a jump mechanic, it ends up being a pain most time as they are blocking your path or have enemies behind protective cover.
Another note: the game is meant to be fairly manic to produce an entertaining action experience, but allowing multiple NPCs with attributes that spawn smaller, much quicker enemies (near enough a dozen in seconds) makes the experience a pain. While you are trying to land a devastating pound attack, their certain level modifiers restrict your movements and make things stupidly overwhelming. In addition, only your character can’t dash and shoot at the same time to avoid these problems. Dash and shoot would help out greatly or an upgrade to dispense a onetime mass kill like Ultratron would be beneficial. Balancing seems off in this respect because it thoroughly screws you over from reaching a max combo or just surviving. It can be overlooked if you’re decent enough and have timing on your side but for the most part it feels like a developer’s trick to ensure you die more often, thanks to multiple unfair advantages to the enemy.
Also with the game only allowing players to fire upwards, it vastly limits the way the game could be played. This choice reduces elements such as level design and more inventive enemy types. It feels like Space Invaders but with NPCs that drop down to attack much more rapidly and you having no support. The Bug Butcher is good, but I feel with some more work, it could have been spectacular and instead plays it safe. The game experience throughout runs all on the same level, only to increase enemy count, add some level modifiers, which usually act as a means to break you combo meter and just to allow you to shoot lots of colorful antagonists without much thought to it. Nothing really strikes you as dynamic, new or breaking away from the mold.
Nonetheless, Awfully Nice Studios have produced a game that is gloriously fast paced and filled with some pretty good action. Overall, the experience is solid for the price despite being a little short lived for its repetitive nature and limited design. It’s a fun game for short sessions; it’s nothing that would captivate you unless an avid arcade shooter gamer but definitely worth the price.
A PC code for The Bug Catcher was provided by Awfully Nice Studios for the purpose of this review