Indie Space Invaders addicted to RNG drugs

Super Destronaut DX is a pretty simple Space Invaders clone. It's easy to pick up and play, with a good amount of modes. There are some options I set off by default which were too distracting, and I appreciate the option being there because otherwise I probably wouldn't have liked this game too much. The gameplay is pretty solid and is short wave-to-wave rounds with a limited amount of lives and a leaderboard to conquer. Shoot more enemies consecutively within 3 seconds and you'll increase your score multiplier. The better you are at dodging enemy attacks, the better you will perform on the leaderboard. This works pretty well.. except for time attack mode. Time attack mode (and the latter half of challenge mode) shows one of my biggest complaints with the game. Time limits are often pretty strict, and in challenge mode the requirements are pretty high. This is still doable as I did it myself.. but only if RNG favours you. It doesn't matter how good you are at Space Invaders, without power-ups you won't conquer these challenges. And power-ups can be gained from enemies that may or may not appear in a wave, and is completely random. You may see where I'm going with this but yes, if you get the wrong power-ups, or no power-ups at all, you're probably going to press the restart button pretty often. Like I said, this doesn't matter for regular modes but for time attack, you will definitely need the power-ups. I will compliment the game for having restarts be pretty much instantaneously, but with that comes another problem. The port is pretty.. lazy and pretty much requires you to have a gamepad. But the gamepad does not have a button mapped for the pause menu, so you have to go to your keyboard and press a button there. You can try playing it with the mouse and keyboard.. but the mouse doesn't show up. So yeah, you practically need both, at least for a few options. Finally, I feel the achievements are way too easy. I don't mind an easy completion every now and then, but I only need to do 2/5th of the challenges and get a few points in the scoreboard modes and I already have everything. I did all the challenges but purely for my own satisfaction. Overall Super Destronaut DX is a fun indie Space Invader that you can spend a few hours on at best.

7/10