AEGIS 2816 (Geometric Twitch Shooter)

Here’s a fun one. Or I mean a fun one. I was first drawn to the design of AEGIS 2186 because of its simple, minimalist approach to the space shooter genre. If you’re familiar with Tempest, Gyruss, and others, this little beauty, still largely unknown, has similar trappings, yet its modern approach is to its benefit. It relies on geometric shapes for design, creating an abstract shooter with totally killer soundtrack called “Friendly Space Monsters” courtesy of mystery-man Oliver Dowie. Just the neo-cyberpunk style of the tunes is going to make you happy to take revenge on geometry.

 

 

Created by Jollyfish Games, who have a minor shooter title before this, AEGIS 2186 is built on a very simple idea. Control a central hud/ship referred to as the “ultimate weapon” to save mankind from an alien force. Think Asteroids, but without  the ability to move from your central location.  Movement is restricted entirely to rotating around a central point. From there you can blast your circle death bullets, or hold in the trigger to create shots of a bigger radius, filling most of the screen, and take out the frikken aliens, which take the shape (get it, I’m funny) of triangles. The bigger they are, the power to take them out, and you have a limited shield system. The largest triangles dish out various power-ups, including limited refills on scatter missiles. After killing a ton triangles, you get upgraded to the next “Aegis Level,” and play runs until you die, it’s that simple. I’ve thus far made it nearly to Aegis Level 4, but good luck even getting that far.

  

That’s because this game is heart-attack level. AEGIS 2186 is easy to sit down and start without the tutorial, but you really won’t understand until you sit down and your fingers start to twitch from the tension. This is all about survival and beating records, and it gets intense quickly. The soundtrack is addictive, but repetitive, and as far as I found there are no further enemies than what you see within the first few minutes. For future updates it would be great to see additional enemies, and I would anticipate different shapes with different movement capabilities. For now you have to deal with crushing three-sided beasts, but you can change the colors of the game, so that’s a welcome feature. We’ll see what Jollyfish Games does with it over the next few weeks, hopefully there will be some additions, but even if there aren’t, it’s hard not to enjoy AEGIS 2186, though I assure you it’s something you sit down with for a short while only.

 

AEGIS 2186 Official Steam Page

Written by Stanley Stepanic

AEGIS 2186
Jollyfish Games (publisher and developer)
4 / 5