Space Giraffe Review
Do J Allard's face and psychedelic visuals combine for a quality gaming experience?
Firstly: this game is Tempest. Kind of. The first sentence of the "How to play" section of the "Help & Options" for the game would have you believe otherwise, but once you sink your teeth into Space Giraffe and witness the glory of what J Allard's face would have looked like if you were dosing on acid, ecstasy and heroine, all at once, you'll soon be thinking back to the 2D days of the primary colored Tempest. And who could blame you? Take away the extreme psychedelic colors and general funkiness of Space Giraffe and you'd have what appears to be another Tempest clone, but there actually is a bit more to the game than initially meets the eye. But not much.
A word to the wise, you'll want to try out the tutorial mode before getting started with the real levels within the game. Even with the tutorial mode under your belt, the world of Space Giraffe will still be largely undiscovered, meaning you'll have to do some more reading on the interweb to find out the intricacies of the game. Basically the gameplay goes like this. Piloting your giraffe - though it looks nothing like the long-necked animal - is just as easy as it was in a classic game of Tempest. Just move left and right around boards that take different shapes but provide similar functionality. Strafe and you'll survive, stay stagnant and you'll die. Or you so you would think.
See, just as in Tempest, your opposition starts at the bottom of the map and slowly works their way toward you. Some fire bullets at you, others just slowly maraud their way closer and closer to your position. Where the twist comes in is when power ups, bombs, and jump pods are thrown into the mix. As you destroy more and more enemies - by the way, you aim your constant stream of death-dealing power with the right analog - power ups are thrown your way. You can use those power ups to perform the all-important jump attack. This is also where the thin layer of strategy makes its way into the game.
Unlike Tempest, when you have a jump pod at your disposal it's actually smart to let the stampeding enemy make their way up to your level of the map. Accumulate enough, use a jump pod, then swirl around the level and smash all of the enemies off of your level. This increases your multiplier and score by quite a lot. There is another way to attain the ability to knock enemies off of the board, and that's to keep the level extended. I know it's confusing, but such is Space Giraffe.
Basically every time you kill an enemy the stage extends, keep it extended to its max and you'll have the ability to run into enemies that make their way up to your level. So now we have jump pods and level extending, but what about the bombs that games of this sort seem to always have? Well, fate would have it that the bombs in Space Giraffe are actually the simplest dynamic of them all. Basically you start each stage with a bomb (represented by a long tail stemming off of your character). Use it or don't, you get one per stage. It's that easy.
The real problem with Space Giraffe isn't with its confusing jump pod mechanic that the tutorial does a terrible job of explaining, or its all-too-simple bombing dynamic, but instead the real issues we have with the game are in the standard gameplay and the problems that the basic design of the game presents. Essentially it's the game's ridiculously spazzy '70s graphics that will have some gamers' heads throbbing and others suffering from seizures. There's just too much going on in Space Giraffe for its own good.
It's all too often that you'll be zooming around a level, firing at the stampeding enemy, when all of a sudden your giraffe will croak. Why you ask? Apparently a minute bullet from the enemy made its way to your giraffe, but you couldn't see the damned thing because of the trippy chaotic backdrops. It also doesn't help that shots from the enemy, explosions, and power ups all look fairly similar. There are also stages that make it impossible to see what's coming at you. I don't know whose bright idea it was to have a stage that progresses in a straight line from the eye of the camera, but you'll feel cheated when you die because of poor level construction.
All of those negatives and we haven't even mentioned the intrinsic boredom that comes with a 2D side-scroller where all you do is bombard the attacking enemy with bombs, shots, or knocking them off the map. Things get stale in a hurry, though that's after the initial wave of frustration. Oh, and if you're hoping to rack up some easy achievement points with this cheap (400 point) XBLA purchase, you'll need to look elsewhere. The achievements in Space Giraffe are both time consuming and extremely difficult.
At the end of the day not many people will want to spend more than an hour with Space Giraffe. Maybe if the gameplay were more endearing to the casual gamer, or if the visuals didn’t make half of the people who play the game foam at the mouth, or perhaps if the levels weren’t designed to cheat the player, then maybe, just maybe Space Giraffe would have been as cool as its designers had hoped. As it stands this game is most definitely not giraffetastic. But it does have J Allard’s face in it, that has to count for something.