AF-ZERO

I went into AF-ZERO hoping to find a quiet little love letter to the arcade cabinets of the 1980s, the kind of thing a solo dev stitches together at midnight because the era genuinely meant something to them. What I found is more complicated than that, and honesty feels kinder here than cheerleading. At its core, this is a vertical shoot-em-up with a lunar-invasion premise: an alien virus has taken over a military base on the moon, and only the uninfected prototype spacecraft, piloted by someone called Vania Scorpion, is left to track down and destroy the source. It is a pure arcade setup, the kind of story that exists to give you permission to shoot things. The game spans seven stages with multi-directional scrolling, and it arms you with three distinct weapons, each upgradeable across three power levels. Enemy variety is present, if not deep. You can feel the DNA of late-80s shooters in the structure, the way each stage pushes relentlessly forward and the weapon system is built around collecting power-ups rather than loadout strategy. Where the affection starts to waver is in the execution. The one public curator note on Steam is not kind, describing the presentation as feeling closer to a mobile port than a PC game built with care. That criticism lands because the visual style does lean toward functional over atmospheric. If you have spent time with the classics this title nods toward, genres like Aleste or Thunder Force, the gap between the inspiration and the result is visible. Scrolling scenarios are there, the action is continuous as promised, but the sense of craft and personality that makes retro shmups hold up across decades is thinner than it should be. Who is this actually for? Collectors who want every entry in a genre, shmup completionists who genuinely cannot pass a vertical shooter without at least one run, or players who find something meditative in a very short, very cheap action loop. The session length is low. Seven stages at casual difficulty means you are in and out quickly, which is not necessarily a flaw if the structure is clean. Partial controller support is listed, which is worth noting for a genre that benefits enormously from analog input. As someone who cares about whether a small game knows what it is trying to be, AF-ZERO sits in an uncomfortable middle space. The intent is clear, the tribute is genuine, but the presentation does not quite match the reverence the concept deserves. It is the kind of game I want to champion, and the kind that makes championing it honestly difficult.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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