Quick Review: Bezier

 

Multidirectional shmups are fun too!

Bezier, developed by Philippe Bak and published by Niine Games on March 3rd, 2016, is about humanity’s life inside a computer simulation following some kind of cataclysm in the real world. Our hero is a ship working to protect this virtual world against the various threats that pop up to endanger it.

That's cyberspace? Looks just like normal space to me.

Now to fight that boss that just won't die.

On each level, represented by a "grid" (a virtual area), there is a main quest to destroy a certain amount of protected enemies. Also on each level, said enemies come with their own gimmick; they’re as basic as can be on Phase 1, are protected by half a circle of indestructible objects in Phase 2… I remember one of the more clever cases where they were attached to a rope with more enemies on it and you had to kill the enemies first, in order from the tail end of the rope all the way to the big enemy, in order to hurt the last one. At the end of every phase, 30 seconds to the end of the countdown, a larger creature appears and you must shoot at it… though it’s never really “destroyed”, as far as I know… And when the countdown ends, so does the level, if all protected enemies have been destroyed.

Yes, my ship is confused, I know, thanks for telling me.

And of course, the story progresses after each phase. You can thus learn more about that world, and unravel a fairly interesting philosophical discussion. I do find it funny that your health and power boosts are labeled “Ouch” and “Oomph”, respectively. Along with all this is a system in which the blue bits dropped by enemies allow you to level up and improve your ship. Upon defeating the larger enemies required to complete a level, you can also gain access to one of many stronger moves that you can then activate to help you in these tasks (though they have cooldowns). Oh, and be careful, too, because some enemies out there have particularly nasty abilities, such as confusion (your ship will shoot in all directions instead of where you want it to), paralysis, and similar things like that.

As a final note, you can use the left mouse button to shoot in a chosen direction, or use the right button to just shoot instantly in the direction of enemies.

Splodey!

The game has an Endurance Mode split in waves, and a few bonuses such as daily rewards if you play every day.

I wasn’t super-attracted to this one. The plot didn’t hook me in, but the gameplay was fun. Sometimes, I liked to try and figure out how to beat the enemies, but the fact that the “boss” of each Phase would just come to bug me for 30 seconds and then go away again (before I could defeat it) was a bummer. The additional options are pretty cool too. I’m not really big on Bezier, but if you enjoy this type of game, it should be right up your alley.

It’s usually available for roughly 10$ on Steam.