Velocity 2X is really awesome.

BUY.

I've been hearing a lot of people say nothing but good things about Velocity 2X, but when they described it, it was always "shmup". If you aren't familiar with the term "shmup", it generally refers to shoot 'em ups, or "bullet hells", which you have to move your character/ship/etc. through waves of projectiles to shoot your enemy.

Imagine if someone spilled sprinkles all over a galaga screen, and that's what a shmup is - it's super hardcore, and some people LOVE IT. It's very much a "love it or hate it", and I'm just not into it. I was kinda dissapointed when I heard the game had almost metroid like platforming sections, because that sounded really awesome, but I'm just not a big fan of Shmups.

I got the game for free through PS+, loaded it onto my Vita, and there it sat for many moons. Recently I had to go to the bank, and while sitting in line, I decided to give Velocity a shot.

The game .. is incredibly addicting. It's not so much a shmup -- I mean, it really is, but it's more Galaga with an obstacle course, than it is a bullet hell, like the Touhou games. You have to collect "survivors" while flying through the level, teleporting past walls, shooting enemies and switches, and in certain parts of a level, you have to exit your ship and enter a 2D "platforming" challenge area where you rush through, collecting crystals and looking for switches to shoot so you can hop back in your ship and keep progressing. I'm still fairly early on, so the platforming hasn't been too intense yet, but the way it plays with how you use your characters teleport ability (you have it both on your ship and on your person) to traverse the map is beautiful.

At the end of each level, you're ranked on how many survivors you picked up, how many crystals you picked up (when applicable, as you only obtain crystals when you enter a 2D platforming section) your score (totaled by deaths, and how many survivors / crystals you picked up) and then my personal favorite -- how fast you completed it.

This game THRIVES on speed, and when you reach a skill level (which I'm nowhere near) that you can hold your thrust button, while managing to seamlessly teleport through obstacles, and still manage to collect all the survivors / crystals in a level? It's fantastic. I've tried quite a few times to be that good to no avail, but if you DO manage to achieve this level of mastery, you're rewarded with an endgame score of "perfect", which you can see at any time from the level select screen.

Let's discuss that endgame score a bit too, shall we? When you finish the level, it shows you your score, and that's always there on the level select screen. It shows you how fast you finished the level, the survivors you rescued, the crystals you obtained, and your "score". I covered that -- what I didn't go over is why that matters; you see, in order to progress to later levels, you need to have a certain amount of "EXP", which you can only gain by completing levels and achieving the highest tier of those goals.

You don't have to achieve them all at the same time, so if you only grab 80 of 80 survivors in a level, and nothing else? You'll gain the EXP for that, and it'll stay that way forever -- if you've capped it, you unlocked it. I usually go for all survivors / crystals / score on my first run, then speed the second -- and it's incredibly effective at the current point I'm at in the game.. (which to be fair is like, level 9.)

It creates an incredibly addicting experience, however, and I played it long after I had gotten through at the bank, and had come home. It was a refreshing experience, to find a game that could finally break Destiny's stranglehold on me, and I think I'm going to keep going back to it.

If you were on the fence about this game, or if you got it for free on PS+? Give it a shot, it might surprise you.. I know it surprised the hell out of me.