Viricide
To begin with, all Viricide seems to be a decent shooter. You control a "User" set up with an Anti-Viral Unit, as well as a series of upgrades called "software updates", which you need to collect bits of data, called, in a stoke of imagination, "bits", to activate. These are retrieved from the remains of eliminated viruses. Controls are basic, and while the bits become harder to obtain with enemies spamming the screen on later levels, the difficulty is consist throughout.
There are, however, some areas where the game rises from mediocrity. The gameplay flows from fight to defeat to fight again with only two taps of the spacebar. There is no penalty to defeat, meaning you can repeat levels over and over again (and you will) until you win. But that is not what makes this game as absorbing as it is. Other shooters have done this before, and many have done it better.
Remember in Portal when GlaDos would say something like "Dying here will result in immediate failure"? It's that kind of dark humour that to appears in the between level screens, the "You have died" screen and even the upgrade screen. But more than the jokes, the interest is the person that the story revolves around. GlaDos was somewhere between human and machine, which made her intriguing. EXADI (Extremely Advanced Intelligence) has the same attraction in this, blurring the borders of Advanced Intelligence and humanity. I won?t spoil anything, but the story that progresses in short snippets between levels has more emotion than a thousand fallen brothers-in-arms in the latest "Overgrown Tank Men VII: Hoorah".
And pay attention to the background. You will know it when you see it.
