Toting a similar style play-style and delivery to old-school titles such as DOOM and Duke Nuke’m arrives, Madness Beverage. In this title you are in control of a space pirate named Caleb, who is out on an intergalactic adventure to claim rare ingredients to create beverages to assist in destroying a grand evil. Manos, whom Caleb pursues, has unleashed all of hell, fueling your pursuit to power to stop it.
Once your adventure truly begins, you have a ship, which acts as your safe house type hub space. From the safety of your ship you get to choose each mission you want to pursue. Each mission has its own goodies to find from guns to grenades, and of course, your ingredient. At the end of a mission you do have a boss to fight, which are all unique encounters in their own ways. Once the boss has been defeated, you will have your goods to take to the “town” area, where you can refill ammo and obtain new drinks.
The drinks you obtain from the boss cores are all unique power-ups with pros and cons to each. Effects such as auto-target bullets or slowdown time are available on the drinks, but of course come at a cost. Some of the adverse effects can be very dangerous, being things like higher damage taken or making enemies more aware of you causing more swarms. Cons being included on the drinks is a nice dynamic to combat really making the player need to think about whats happening opposed to simply allowing you to blast away without thought.
Normal type enemies you will encounter are a little varied, but will feel repetitious after a while. For most of the game, the same 5 or so enemies will be what carries the weight of common combat. Although having their own variety and enemies all feeling unique, the differences don’t really keep the combat mixed up enough to really keep things overly interesting.
Environmentally, the similar issues can be found as said about the enemies; each environment has their own visual unique flavor, but structurally, the difference is not vast. Some levels will feel like they stand out a big more because the structural difference is there, but unfortunately, some stages feel very straight forward and not varied in shape.
Much like those old school shooters, you also get the tough-guy one liners on repeat. This is one of my most stand-out problems with this game, but it is something I could get over. Whether intended or not, the voice acting is awful and not enough variety is available to accommodate how often Caleb talks during encounters. Often times, you will hear the same lines repeated multiple times during a single encounter.
However negative as these issues may sound, the game is pretty good. Madness Beverage is not going to be among triple A titles in terms of quality, but as a tribute to old-school FPS formats, it is very successful. In the options there is even a setting to turn on old school visuals, which are not exactly the same as old school, but more so a super low resolution. Still, this idea is fun and gives a similar feeling to the game.
Madness Beverage is a fun game that, although won’t leave you speechless, will still be a fun ride. There is easily a few hours of content here to keep you busy for the price.
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