Popslinger Review – Good Art, Bad Game

This game looks almost exactly like River City Girls. However, this is a shooter instead of a beat-em-up.

It’s also terrible.

Great Art Style, Bad Art

I just need to tear into the art for a moment before we get into the gameplay.

The art in this game looks like a college project conversion of River City Girls. The style is exactly the same, but the quality is nowhere close. Everything looks ever so slightly off. Like it’s 100% concept art.

The game also has this obnoxious, heavy scanline filter over everything that legitimately gave me an immediate headache. Thankfully you can turn it off, as well as the terrible screenshake.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about the camera being too close to your character at ALL times.

This game looks and feels like an itch.io project. I have links to itch.io projects from friends that look, and play, better than this.

They Don’t Know What They’re Doing

I don’t believe that anyone involved in this game has any idea what makes a game enjoyable.

Let me back up a little and explain what the game is.

In this game, you shoot monsters in various levels with your guns (shotgun, pistol, laser). When you kill four monsters of the same colour in a row, the game will provide you with a power-up. If you then kill 4 more monsters of another colour, then the music will become more prominent (we’ll get back to the music).

This works almost like the style system in DMC. The better you do, the more bombastic the music gets. The more enemies you hit without getting hit, the higher your combo goes. This, in turn, raises your score and contributed to your overall level rank.

The problem is that the game in which these systems are in is awful. The movement is limited to the left stick and your dodge. This dodge is absurd; it can be useful in very select situations, but the end lag is so pronounced that I almost always got hit right after I dodged anyway.

Also, while most of the power-ups are at least serviceable, I’m almost certain there is one power-up that is just useless. It’s supposed to be a heal, but the animation seems to have no i-frames, so anytime I got it, I would just get hit out of it, and then that’s it. What an absolute banger of a reward!

The guns feel serviceable, and shooting enemies works in the sense that they die, but nothing feels good. There are no upgrades outside of weapons, there is no progression outside of beating the next tedious boss, and there is no reason to chase S ranks unless you believe your time to be worth nothing.

The guns do have one issue where the actual hitbox begins at the barrel of the gun and not where you’re standing. This is usually fine, but if you ever get backed into a corner, you can never hit the enemy in front of you. This feels like an otherwise fine consideration that just doesn’t work with this often terrible camera in such cramped environments.

You travel around a bland 3-D space and shoot the same looking monsters for about 7 levels. Then the game is over. It takes about 2 hours. And a lot of that was me just trying to convince myself to keep playing.

A+ Soundtrack For A D- Game

The soundtrack is supposedly original, and it’s great. It’s a legitimately great bubblegum pop/ snyth/ retro soundtrack. I have no notes.

Skule Toyama is the best part of this game and he is the only reason why anyone should even consider buying this. But you still shouldn’t. Just add the soundtrack to one of your playlists and enjoy the tracks completely free of this horrid game.

Anything Else?

At least this game is cheap, about $15. Not an excuse for how bad it is, but at least it’s reasonable. However, this low price point brings up another potential issue.

This platinum took me about an hour to get. You don’t even have to beat the game, just the first two levels. While I appreciate being rewarded so handsomely for my dedication, this is a joke.

This may not be intentional, but these sorts of games always have easy platinums as a way to boost sales among the pathetic people who actually care about that sort of thing (like me). I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt, but this practice is leading to the oversaturation of garbage flooding the PS store.

Now, on to the performance issues. I didn’t have anything major happen. I glitched out of bounds once and was able to walk to the actual title screen art, but that’s about it. This next point may have been down to optimization, but the ENTIRE time I was playing this, my PS5’s fan was squeaking and significantly louder than usual. Almost as if this game was overclocking the system.

If my PS5 ever dies to one of these games, I’m suing.

Anyway, don’t buy this. This is trash. It is worth no-one’s time. Listen to the soundtrack on Youtube.