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Gone Too Long but Back At Last, Truxton Extreme Demo Released

Gone Too Long but Back At Last, Truxton Extreme Demo Released

Nostalgia is one hell of a drug, but like any drug its strength wears off with overuse. There are endless games out there pandering to how things used to be, and a sure sign that it’s ok to pass is when (Game) is bringing back (thing) where (thing) has a fairly strong library of recent releases already. The trick to nostalgia is to be reverent of the past while being something new, and it honestly doesn’t take a lot to clear that hurdle. Llamasoft’s entire library, Vampire Survivors and its spin-offs being auto-fire Robotron, brawlers with their own combo systems and art styles, and now Truxton Extreme, which is a straight-up sequel to a series that hasn’t had a new entry in thirty three years, are all great examples of looking to the past while keeping the game’s feet rooted cleanly in the present.

Not Even Game of Thrones Takes Thirty Years for a Sequel

The original Truxton games were vertical shooters released in the late 80s/early 90s for arcade and consoles, and while they didn’t set the world on fire they are fondly remembered. The Genesis version was a console staple back in the pre-Sonic days, and while Truxton II never got a US home release it held a secure spot in many arcades. And then three decades passed and the series was dead until suddenly it isn’t any more. Truxton Extreme is the third game in the series, and the demo feels like someone hopped from the past to today without bothering with the intervening years.

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Truxton Extreme is exactly what you’d expect from its name, being a vertical shooter with fairly basic mechanics and a scoring system to match, but somehow making that a strength. Fly up the screen, shoot everything, get powerups, die in a single hit, and that’s basically everything. Each P icon fills up one of three pips in the HUD and when all three are lit it upgrades the gun a level, and the S icons boost the ship’s speed up to five times. Killing enemies fills up a turbo gauge, triggering it overpowers the main weapon as it quickly depletes, and when things are extra-dangerous the generous supply of bombs takes out everything in a large radius. There’s not much to it on paper, but it just feels so right while playing that it doesn’t need anything else.

What made Truxton great wasn’t the bells and whistles but rather the gameplay feel, and the Truxton Extreme demo hasn’t missed a beat with the intervening years. Each of the four weapons has its place, from the straight-ahead green shot to the weak white homing bullets that blanket the screen in overwhelming firepower during the turbo boost. The speed of the ship may increase with the the S powerups but it can be dialed all the way back to the slow starting speed if that’s what makes you comfortable, and while it can be difficult to overcome the long-term habit of saving bombs for later they’re plentiful enough that it makes more sense to use rather than horde them. The difficulty levels range from Heart Starter, where taking a hit is only a momentary stun, to Story with its manga-style narrative, to the straight-up deadly action of Arcade. There’s a lot of meat on Truxton Extreme’s bones and this is only a demo of the first stage.

Truxton was always a great two-game series and the Extreme demo proves that it’s more than nostalgia saying that. Sure, it’s easy to flash back to the 90s blowing off time working at the mall and realizing that I won’t be able to play Truxton II during break any more because a fifty cent game lasts longer than I had, but that time and the arcade are long gone. It’s hard to say how objectively good (there’s no such thing as objectively good) Truxton II was because it’s so tangled up with those years, but what I can say is that it’s great to finally be able to play a new one after all this time. The demo is on Steam and it’s a huge amount of fun whether you’ve got fond memories of Truxton or not, and absolutely worth giving more than a few rounds of play to.


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