Grood

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Grood is a Shmup released on PC in 2018 and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game has players controlling a drone flying through hordes of robotic enemies.

The presentation in Grood is fairly simple, using cel shaded low-poly 3D graphics for both enemies and backgrounds. This would look completely unimpressive and generic if it weren’t for the high speeds the ships in the game are traveling, and the fast-paced metal music playing underneath it all. The result is a game that’s still fairly ugly, but manages to make an argument that this aesthetic may be intentional. In any case, still not great.

The gameplay here prides itself for being hard (you start the game choosing from one of three difficulties: hard, hard, and hard), but I don’t feel like it manages to reach this challenge level fairly. There are multiple elements here that make the game harder, but only by making it less playable. You have a perspective that ensures that bullets do not fire in a straight line across the screen, making it much harder to judge your shots. You have a play area that players must scroll around to see everything, meaning you could easily get shot by offscreen enemies without warning. And virtually every enemy in the game is a huge bullet sponge, with many such enemies going super-fast.

Players can gain different weapons to swap between, there’s a slow-motion ability that slowly recharges, and players can technically take multiple hits before dying, but all of these elements only slightly mitigate the core problem – Grood just isn’t very fun to play, and its attempt at being a “hard” Shmup has resulted in it being a largely joyless and frustrating one. You have much better choices in this genre on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Grood is a Shmup that prides itself on being “hard”, but only does so by making enemies bullet sponges, making your shots not fire straight, and by hiding enemies off-screen. This isn’t a “hard” Shmup, it’s just a bad one.

Grade: D

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