Don’t Shoot Yourself!

Developer: Silverware Games, Inc.| Publisher: Silverware Games, Inc. | Release Date: 2015 | Genre: Indie / Action / Strategy | Website: Official Website | Format: Digital Download

Unlike most shooters, Don’t Shoot Yourself doesn’t pit you against some invading alien armada. In fact, as the name of the game suggests, the only danger you have to worry about is actually yourself. This is because your tiny spaceship is imprisoned in a variety of different shaped arenas from which you must escape. Your ship is equipped with a single bullet that can shatter the walls of your prison, but must fire the preceding 100 bullets first in order to do so. This means that you must simply stay alive long enough for your ship to fire the magical bullet, but obviously this is easier said than done.

Although you are required to dodge and weave through numerous bullets in order to survive, Don’t Shoot Yourself is almost more of a puzzle title than a shooter. Your ship automatically fires bullets behind it as you move, which means you have to take the layout of each arena into consideration in order to make things easier for yourself. This is because the irregular shaped walls not only make the ricocheting of the bullets unpredictable, but also because bullets react different to certain walls. Some walls cause bullets to pick up velocity as they ricochet back while others act as warp gates that teleport the bullets to a different part of the arena. Even worse are the ones that turn the bullets invisible or convert them into homing missiles! Most of the levels are rather small too or have moving elements which means things get very crowded very quickly.

It is a very simple concept, but quite addictive and with more than 50 levels there is plenty of challenges. The game also features three difficulty settings, Normal, Hard and Impossible, with the latter in particular requiring exceptional reflexes to complete. Completing a level on Normal nets you a single star while Hard is worth two stars and Impossible a whopping five. The stars are required to unlock the boss battles which you have to complete in order to unlock the next tier of levels. The game can get quite tricky at times, but doesn’t take very long to complete on Normal. The higher difficulty settings offer a much bigger challenge though.

Visually the game keeps everything very simple with backgrounds that consists of colorful patterns and white lines representing your ship, bullets and walls. This means that even when things get chaotic it’s not too difficult to keep track of your ship, which is essential for later levels. The audio is also decent and while not exactly memorable the tunes at least never become annoying. Although Don’t Shoot Yourself can be played with a controller I actually preferred the mouse for this one as it allowed me to thread through the bullets with greater precision. The only problem with the mouse controls are that your ship follows the cursor, so if you go through a warp gate the ship teleports away from the cursor and then immediately tries to get back to it, which can cause confusion. Don’t think that you can simple remain stationary in order to avoid bullets either as doing so will cause your bullets to recharge!

Don’t Shoot Yourself is a lot of fun when played in short burst and although originally a mobile title it looks pretty good on a high resolution monitor. The inclusion of full controller support, Steam Workshop support and Steam Leaderboards also more than justifies the low asking price. This is one of those games with a simple, easy to grasp concept, but which offers a nice challenge. You can simply jump in and have fun without lengthy tutorials or anything getting in the way of the action.