Graceful Explosion Machine is just that, graceful. Its mix of vibrant colors and felicitous audio cues lead the player through a side scrolling arcade shooter that is seemingly a mark above its arcade counterparts.
Players control a ship, which can be flipped 180 degrees to move around the self-wrapping levels, and are armed with four different weapons: a blaster, which fires out the front of the ship, an energy sword, which causes damage in an area around the ship, a sniper beam, which is a strong line of energy that fires from the front of the ship, and missiles, which lock onto to targets in every direction. All of these different powers are controlled by energy resources picked up from defeating enemies. This is where players will be challenged, trying to balance the perfect attack and resource retrieval pattern without leaving yourself vulnerable. It should also be noted that a speed boost can be used to get yourself out of a hectic situation and do a little damage to enemies, but this too is on a cool down.
Hectic situations might as well be the subtitle of Graceful Explosion Machine. During my time with the game at PAX East 2017 I only had a chance to checkout the first set of levels, but those levels already started drowning me in enemies and different groups of enemies. This pushed me to develop new ways of combining the ship’s attacks on the fly, which left me panicked at times, but feeling extremely satisfied when I got out of a fight I thought was a lost cause. Defeating enemies quickly offered up score multipliers. There wasn’t a score requirement to complete any of the levels I played, so it may be safe to assume that leaderboards could appear in the final version.
Although a release date has not been announced, Graceful Explosion Machine is expected to launch sometime in April exclusively on the Nintendo Switch.
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