About Zone Of Alienation:
Zone of Lacryma takes the genre into a role playing direction by introducing a leveling system that provides the player with Upgrade Points upon leveling up. You level up by, you guessed it: running missions and earning experience. The player can repeat any mission after completing it as many times as the player desires, which allows for the possibility of upgrading your ship as much as you want before proceeding ahead. It adds a nice replayability mechanic to the game that helps soften the blow from the crippling dearth in campaign content that Zone suffers from. You’ll find the first few levels pretty easy. The game then hits a massive difficulty spike on the fourth mission when you’re required to tail a bogey in front of you with the Turbo Boost™ enabled (queue Knight Rider theme) through a majority of the mission. As of this review, I’m still on this mission and have yet to beat it. Quick but sweet SHMUP with a simple but engaging leveling system in which your Score is your Experience to level up and get bonus stats such as bullet speed or recharge rate. Took me around 3h to beat with a lot of retries on the last few missions, but there was absolutely no filler, no stages where I actually knew what was going to happen, it was exclusively good content from start to finish. Might be a bit overpriced for the time you’ll likely spend on it but it’s really fun to replay as levels have are many separate parallel paths to complete.
