Galactix

A bullet gets lost in endless darkness of starry sky, and you shoot it back. Galactix is a simple arcade game from the early nineties that has no idea what to do with ambition or the urge to explain itself — it just throws you into space and waits to see what you'll do.

You control a small ship in the middle of the screen that can rotate and move along the edges, which sometimes helps you, sometimes complicates your life. Enemy objects and projectiles come out of the darkness, you try to shoot accurately and for as long as possible. There's no explanation, no plot, just geometric shapes trying to destroy you. Does it sound familiar? Yes, this game feeds on a pattern that's been worn thin since the eighties, just with better graphics on a PC-compatible computer.

The problem is that the pattern itself isn't bad — it's boring. There's no invention or twist that sets it apart from a dozen other stories about shooting in the dark. The bullet physics work mechanically, unpredictably. Sometimes it feels like the game is controlling accuracy for you, other times it looks like the bullets are flying according to mood. Sound is what an arcade machine from the early nineties should have — system beeps that will rob you of hearing after fifteen minutes. The screen is readable, the colors are appropriate, but nothing about it grabs you.

Galactix is a typical DOS novelty that thought geometry and the number of enemies were enough for fun. They weren't. The game holds its own with Asteroids or Vortex from the same period, but without their shine or poisonous elegance. It's solid technical exercise that someone was tasked to do, and it was done — no worse, but definitely not better.

Nowadays you'll play it in a nostalgic retro game archive when you want to go back to a time when simple action games were still simple without wit. It's not a marvel and never was, but if you're curious what average geometric shooters were like in DOS, these twenty minutes are fine. Without you remembering anything about it afterward.