Science Fiction is a fantastic genre and often gets even better when in the realm of Japanese Animation.
Unfortunately my knowledge of such anime is limited, but I know the basics. You need space ships, mechs, questionable dialogue, missile swarms, and explosions. If there was some way to slap all this into a video game that could be pretty amazing right? Well, the Developers at 17-Bit have heard your screams and have delivered! Galak-Z: The Dimensional was released on August 4^th for the Playstation 4 and will be coming to PC later this year. 

Galak-Z Is a 2D space shooter that has several elements from the rogue-like genre. The game is broken up into seasons and each mission is an episode. This is a neat touch that gives that Sci-Fi Anime spin to the game. Each time you start a mission you get a sweet episode title much like your favorite old school space anime.  Then you are given an objective to complete in the stage. The really cool thing is the missions always seem to be different. Pretty sure they are procedurally generated. This is great because when you die, and YOU WILL, you don’t have to play the same stages over and over again. The difficulty ramps up pretty quickly, but if you’re careful and patient often times you can get out of a jam. 

The game play in Galak-Zis fairly simple. You fly around, blow stuff up, and try not to get killed yourself. There is also a stealth element and often being sneaky is the best option. When you do blow things up, you can collect salvage of all sorts. The salvage is used to upgrade your ship in various ways. You can customize your weapons to do different things like bounce of walls, spread gun, and light things on fire. There are also shield and armor upgrades. The bad thing is that when you die, you lose all your upgrades. This can be frustrating if you’ve built up a great ship, however often times you will find purple coins. These you save even after death and can be cashed in for salvage, thus allowing you to upgrade your ship from the start of the season, which brings a sense of balance to the game. 

At some point your ship will be able to transform into a mech and gets new attacks and a different play style. Switching between the two will be vital to success as the game continues to get even more challenging. Along with the difficulty, the enjoyment continues as well. Galak-Z has a great soundtrack that’s very ambient and spacey. The controls seem fairly tight. It reminds me of the Genesis game Sub-Terrania. R2 turns on the forward thrusters and L2 is reverse. If you move forward and stop using thrusters, you still move forward with momentum so mastering these physics will be part of the learning curve. The thrusters also make noise so using them when being stealthy is another skill to hone. There are also plenty of environmental hazards that can be used to your advantage, or can mess you up big time if you are not careful.

Galak-Z is  a pretty fun game, not the best I’ve played but I do thoroughly enjoy it. My own major gripe is sort of silly and it’s the faces of the characters. They sort of look like poor flash animations of anime tropes but, everything else looks great. I just can’t get past their faces. The dialogue kind of bothers me as well. If you have the extra cash and are looking for a solid game that reminds you have an old school space Anime, Galak-Z is for you.