Leave Home

By: Guest Reviewer

On: January 9th, 2010

[This is a guest review by anosou of an XBLIG game.]

Leave Home is a procedural, scrolling, score attack shooter. This basically means that the “levels” take shape depending on how you play. You can simply describe it as “do good = more stuff” but there’s a bit more to it than that. The smoothness of how the levels change is admirable – during my first couple of playthroughs I didn’t realize it got progressively harder the better I was playing. When I started learning the enemy and bullet patterns, thus scoring more points, I began to see the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between a good and a bad playthrough. For example I reached an area in the third stage I had never seen before when I had racked up some massive points, it was quite the revelation. There is much more under the hood than just “more points = more enemies” and it’s incredibly satisfying to explore this.

At heart Leave Home is a scrolling shooter with a lot of what comes with the genre. Luckily Hermitgames has worked on these before (Fren-zE for example) and knows exactly how it’s done. There are plenty of nods toward established games in the genre but the game still manages to feel fresh. The side-scrolling first level has a distinct Gradius-flavor, even similar enemy patterns. The fourth level feels like a nod towards Treasure’s Ikaruga and a late part of level 3 is pretty much an homage to Jeff Minter’s unreleased Unity project for GameCube. The two bosses you face at the end are very challenging and brings a definite bullet hell flavor to the game. Overall Leave Home feels like one big love letter to the shmup masters but because of the procedural nature it manages to keep it interesting. One of the more original gameplay elements is the ability to split shots with the right trigger, nothing fancy but it gives you a lot of extra control over how you play since the game lacks power-ups.

Leave Home is a fixed length game which essentially means a session will always take the same amount of time to complete. The beauty of this score attack mode of play is how it’s evolved in Leave Home as a result of the dynamic levels. If you do very good on level 3 for example you get to new parts of level 3 faster and these places generally have more possibilities to rack up a good score. The different ways you can play through a session, even though they’re all the same length, are staggering because of how the different stages change depending on how you do. If only XBLIG supported Leaderboards like XBLA does.. this would be the game to compete in.

Oh hey, did I mention that this game takes Rez and makes tough love to it to produce it’s graphics? The future-retro (yes, future-retro) flavor really makes the game pop out of the screen. Things explode into bursts of glowing particles and the clean cut shapes and black background work as great contrast to this light show. The music isn’t half bad either. Distorted squeaky acid basslines, glittering crunchy pads, Roland drum machines and other goodies go very well with the visuals and change seamlessly between levels.

The game is available for Xbox Live Indie Games for 240MS (roughly three puny earth dollars) and there’s a free demo to go with that too so I urge you to take a look.

TIGdb: Entry for Leave Home