I’m sure you’ve all heard it before. “Damn vectors!” people cry out. Well, that’s what the developer of “Rasternauts” would have you believe, as you fight for the “raster” sprites against the “vector” sprites.
Any platformer, even a shooting platformer like this, lives or dies on its controls, and here they’re excellent. The other things you want is replayability, and this has it in spades thanks to several difficulty levels, and four characters to play through each difficulty level with. The characters are a lot more than just a palette swap here, as they have individual weapons that really affect play, making multiple playthroughs with different characters a very different experience. There are a variety of in-game power-ups too.
The game eases you into the controls and teaches you abilities very effectively, and that contributes to XBLA-level presentation. There’s a lot to like in this $1 run-and-gun platformer.
Here’s what the developer (Mostly Fictional) has to say about the game:
“A pixel perfect way of life is under threat when a scientific experiment gone wrong uncovers a new dimension composed entirely of vectors! Run, jump and shoot your way through 36 levels to save your bitmapped buddies, hold back the vector invasion, and save all of raster kind!”
Writings of Mass Deduction 