A REVIEW BY IAN CHANDLER

Creepy Road from Groovy Milk and Grab Games is the latest Metal Slug-a-like on Steam for £9.99. The soundtrack is also available for £1.27.

The story goes that grizzled trucker Flint Trucker is on his way home when a crazed circus bear runs out in front of him, causing his truck to crash. The only way for Flint to get home is to walk through the woods, gunning down all in sight, whilst trying to work out what’s driving every creature he meets homicidal.

The art style Is really nice, with excellent use of colour, and the soundtrack compliments what’s going on very well. There are a few repetitive speech samples which play throughout but you generally end up ignoring these after a while.

The game starts you off with a revolver, which is fine for the smaller enemies like homicidal rabbits and pigs carrying hams, but as you progress you grab better weapons to help take out larger enemies -a favourite being a gun that turns enemies into poop- as well as grenades and molotov cocktails. I found myself mainly using the shotgun as it had the best balance of speed of fire and stopping power, with most enemies taking 2 shots to kill. You can shoot in either direction or straight up, but there is no diagonal fire which was a pain.

As for the enemies, you’ll be up against bears on unicycles, floating pandas, birds that drop swordfish on you and rednecks with shotguns and flaming torches. And this is the first couple of stages! Whilst the variety of enemies increases as you move through the game, the variety in the game itself doesn’t. You’re basically walking right to left shooting whatever is in front of you. The scenery may change, but the action doesn’t. There was a Boss fight at the end of the third stage, and later in the game there is a flying section which sees you riding a missile, but it’s basically pretty repetitive. There is a life meter for Flint, checkpoints as you go through the game and infinite lives so how far you get will really depend on your patience and how much work you want to put in.

As one of the loading screens suggests, I played with an Xbox 1 controller, and in later stages of the game I found serious glitches where the game would suddenly have Flint walking in one direction I wasn’t pointing in and firing when I hadn’t pressed a button. This lead to at least one death where it sent Flint straight into a landmine which was frustrating to say the least! I checked everything and the controller was functioning perfectly, so I can only assume this is an in-game glitch which will hopefully be patched, because as it stands, it’s quite game breaking.

So, what we have here is a gorgeous looking side scrolling shooter that looks like it’s escaped from the App Store, with fairly repetitive gameplay and some serious control issues. Worth a look? Well if you like Metal Slug and want to take a chance on the control issues being ok for you then sure, but perhaps wait for a Steam sale, as at the moment it’s really only fun in quick bursts and when it behaves itself!

- Ian