MEGATech Reviews: Assault Android Cactus for PC

I made the inexcusable error of judging a book by its cover and by cover I mean title and by book I mean Assault Android Cactus.

When I got the email with a review code graciously provided by Witch Beam, something about the name just didn’t sit well with me, maybe because I’m just a pessimistic old curmudgeon. However, I’m also (barely) a professional, so I sucked it up and soldiered on. Then I had fun. Then I got sucked in by the game’s charm. Then I had even more fun.

Load Out, Charge Up, Get Down

Assault Android Cactus is a top-down twin-stick bullet hell shooter with a side-scrolling shoot-em-up upgrade system. Did you get all that? Well go back and re-read it because I’m not typing it again.

The game lets you play as nine different androids (though they’re not all unlocked at first), each with a different pair of weapons. You have your primary weapon, which you’ll be doing the vast amount of your shooting with, and then you have your big, bad secondary weapon, which is limited by a cooldown timer, but it’s a pretty generous timer.

There’s another timer you have to worry about and this one is a lot more important. As an android, you have a battery, and it’s continuously running out. You have health too, and if that gets depleted you’ll fall to the ground, lose all of your powerups, and have to jam on the controls to get back into the fight, but it’s your battery you have to worry about. You can keep it charged by collecting batteries dropped by defeated enemies, but if your battery drops to zero, you’re a goner.

Into the Heat of Battle

You’ll shoot a lot of robots, and I mean a lot.

A civilian space freighter is under attack by its own robot workforce and it’s your job as space cop Cactus to lead the androids in a battle to defeat the robots and find out what’s gone wrong. It isn’t a complex plot in the slightest, but there’s a certain charm in its simplicity.

There’s also a lot of charm in its characters and dialogue. Basically there’s charm all over this game. It’s charming and a hell of a lot of fun.

That’s a Lot of Robots

Then you progress further, the difficulty ramps up, and everything descends into chaos. This genre’s called “bullet hell” for a reason. And the last time I checked, hell isn’t supposed to be particularly fun.

The latter half of Assault Android Cactus is a merciless nightmare, but here’s the thing: some crazy gamers are actually into that sort of thing. The team at Witch Beam took their sub-genre seriously and delivered a grueling experience, so if that’s what you look for in these sorts of things, you get a big enthusiastic thumbs up from me.

There were few sections of the game where the fun stopped for me, and one of them included a rotating level that flung me straight into the horde. No thanks. I was dying enough when I was in control.

The Real Struggle of Assault Android Cactus

Getting knocked down has no real consequence outside of losing your power-ups, which are re-gained fairly quickly, so I do think that the devs at Witch Beam maybe played a little fast and loose with what’s considered “fair” or not. Obviously they wouldn’t conjure up anything so insurmountable as to be game-breaking, but I went through quite a few scenarios where it seemed close enough to impossible to avoid any damage and keep my goodies.

Of course, you could just read the above paragraph as me whining about how tough the game is, and perhaps I am, but even when I find myself getting frustrated at a game’s difficulty, I can almost always pinpoint what I did wrong. There were too many times in Assault Android Cactus where my reaction was more or less “how do I avoid THAT?” and I’m simply entertaining the possibility that escaping unscathed wasn’t always an option. In those cases, I simply took the hit and kept going, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t irritated.

Take a Deep Breath and Continue the Fight

As frustrated as I got with Assault Android Cactus at times, I always found myself going back to it. This is a game that plays better in short bursts. It’ll feel like less of a grind, and you’ll stretch out the campaign, which is pretty short but perfectly fair for the price they’re asking. Then there’s Infinity Drive and Daily Drive, two additional modes to give you more bang for your buck.

Don’t let the cute graphics and bubbly dialogue fool you. Assault Android Cactus isn’t messing around. If you’re looking for a twin-stick challenge, you’ve found it. Get in through Steam now for $14.99.