Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony

In shoot-em-ups (shmups), you are a small spaceship/helicopter/psi-teen/fairy flying either vertically or horizontally through a world of pain. As each new section of screen unfurls itself to your slowly-traversing spaceship, a vast array of ill-meaning enemies make plain their absolute determination to end you. A single neon projectile gently grazing your small hitbox will grant you immediate, inescapable death.

In Jamestown, your aim is to take out Spain and their alien allies in a steampunked 17th century colonial battle for Mars. The opening screen gives you these first sweet motivational morsels;

War upon the East Frontier!

In which a settlement is ravaged by bententacled martians loyal to the Spanish,

And a villain appears.

So it begins! Jamestown greets you with a grin at the outset of its campaign before quickly filling your screen to bursting with a collection of zinging pixels directly reminiscent of a long-lost Cave shmup. The bullets careen around and toward you with increasingly maniacal tendencies as you move through the carnage toward the level’s boss, and they grow in deadly number as you progress through the campaign. The difficulty levels correlate directly to projectile volume and with five options available, everyone is catered for – from the shmup-shy to the bullet hell native.

The game is laid out interestingly, giving a number of different ways to play. There are “bonus maps” which require, for example, survival for a given number of seconds under hostile conditions, or a certain score obtained within a time-limit. This adds a real spark and dimension to what’s on offer. The game has a compelling unlock system too; certain things, like challenges and the hardest difficulty, require playthrough of levels to be unlocked while others, like ships, need to be bought with in-game currency earned from hard graft on the battlefield. “Gauntlet mode” is also available this way, which provides a chance for the shmup veteran to play through the entire 5-level campaign in one breathless sitting, with the same amount of lives and credits that are supplied in the individual campaign levels (three and two, respectively). Level design is clearly well thought-out, and a surprising twist in the final level adds a welcome new element of challenge.

Uprooting the stylings of an old-school vertical shmup into a 16:9 ratio with a slight side-scrolling margin causes some sweat for the lonesome single player. The co-op multiplayer of up to 4-players makes traversing the tundra in its entirety a matter of great ease but, especially with certain ships, covering the whole area in single-player can be difficult – a degree of preemption is required in order to slay satisfactorily and pick up the resulting bounty. The gunner ship gives the best all-round performance, with a damaging beam that you can snake around the screen using the directional controls to aim at specific pieces of unpleasantness as and when they arise.

Points are scored by destruction and collection; coins litter the screen after a big kill, and a good haul will give you the “Vaunt” ability, which, when implemented, creates a Giga Wing-esque shield around your ship. Any bullets falling onto this shield increase your score until the shield disappears, at which point your chaining can begin in earnest – the Vaunt gauge diminishes over time, but is buffered by any additionally collected coins, alongside hefty multipliers. You earn the points when your Vaunt gauge eventually dries up, but if you die before that moment occurs then all is lost. With the Steam leaderboards tracking every submitted highscore, the highscore enthusiast will have many a happy hour brutally smashing his or her head against the neon brick wall of enemy fire.

The co-op multiplayer cleverly avoids individual highscore sabotage by giving each player their own scoring system. One person’s chain is not affected by the action, inaction or death of a space-chum, meaning that multiplayer has some real value beyond “fun” with “friends”. Additionally, a surviving space-chum can save your sorry ass if you manage to get caught by an alien missile. With specific co-op leaderboards, the multiplayer aspect of Jamestown is highly appealing but it’s worth noting that the co-operative play only works locally. I assume this is due to the impact that lag can have on such a fast game, but the lack of an online option is a shame.

My only other gripe with the game rests with the lack of controller customisability. Using a 360 controller, it wasn’t possible to bind Vaunt to a trigger button, which would have been my preference. When playing with a keyboard, directional controls are hard-mapped to the arrow keys, which isn’t always a reliable cluster for multiple simultaneous key presses. Still, these are minor issues that can perhaps be patched out at a later date.