I purchased Biolab Wars on the Nintendo Switch just as I was finishing Savage Halloween, the first game I played from Brazilian developer 2nd Boss Game Studio which I received for an #IndieSelect event. Again, I purchased Biolab Wars because of how much fun Savage Halloween was and I felt no obligation to purchase this game, I just wanted to. I should also warn you that I am going to be making countless comparisons to Savage Halloween because the games are so similar-style shmups but I also try to keep in mind that Biolab Wars was released first, so the comparisons are a little unfair; like talking about A New Hope for the first time and comparing it to The Empire Strikes Back. So now that that is out of the way, let us get down to Biolab Wars!
In terms of release dates, Biolab Wars preceded Savage Halloween so there was a fair amount of this game that felt very familiar. Both are run and gun, shmups where you play a character gunning their way through various areas of a stage culminating in a final boss fight. Each game has an anthropomorphic dog a pumpkin-headed character, and a female character, while Biolab Wars has a fourth semi-generic 80s action movie male hero to play as well. Here, all of the characters have the same stats so the only reason to choose different characters is if you like the color scheme of one over the other or if you genuinely do not like the color orange. For me, I tended to be somewhat superstitious so I would play one character and if I hit a rough patch and died multiple times, I would switch to another character. Because I played as wolf Lulu in Savage Halloween, I decided to play as Teddy, but again, there were no stat differences between any of the characters. After reaching stage two (later) I switched to Becca and played as her for most of the game, only switching to Jack and Finn while going up against the final boss, but ended up going back to Becca.
The plot of the game is about as simplistic as you can get. There is an explosion in 1985 New York. A military general tells his subordinate to call in a group of mercenaries and to enact the Biolab Protocol. Cut to the title screen. You then select your character to single-handedly be airdropped in via helicopter and that is where the mayhem begins. There is no additional dialogue between stages. There is no soliloquy from any of the bosses before, during, or after their fight. There is no additional input from either the General, the Soldier, or any other representative of the military. You just go from one stage to the next shooting hordes of enemies while trying not to die (too often) yourself. You know, a shmup.
Like any good 80s era shooter, there are additional types of guns you can pick up, but unlike Savage Halloween, here you can only pick up one type of ammunition and you use that until you run out of ammunition or pick up a new type of ammo, and then you revert back to your default machine gun when you have run out of the special ammunition. There was also an item drop that gave you more ammunition for whichever type you currently had equipped which is all well and good unless you had the default gun which already has unlimited ammunition so that became essentially useless. The ammo drops appeared to be all planned out, so often times the new type of ammunition would be beneficial against the upcoming enemies. Or I would just ignore it because I did not want to switch to the shotgun spread-type ammo. And while there might have been a difference in the amount of damage different types of ammo caused, I honestly did not notice if the giant ball ammo (pictured above) was more effective than the default ammo, but at least it felt like it was.
Another tactic that I carried over (carried back?) from Savage Halloween was exiting back to the main menu after clearing a stage. The premise here is that there would be a good chance that I died at least once during the stage, especially on my first attempt. So If I were to start a new stage after completing one, I would only have as many lives as I had at the end of the last stage. But your score would carry over. By exiting back to the main menu and essentially restarting a stage, you would go back to having three lives, but your score would reset to zero. There is a Restart option when you pause the game, but that only restarts you from the beginning of the stage and it does not reset the placement of 1-Ups if you had already collected them. So unless I was missing something by having my score reset and not raking up the sweet-sweet points, I had no qualms about exiting out so that I could start a stage with three new lives.
The level design here was a pretty straightforward Contra / Mega Man type approach. Moving left to right, shooting enemies, and collecting ammunition upgrades with an arbitrary score that runs throughout your playthrough (refer to above). And there is one stage that deviates from this formula, somewhat but it comes in Stage 2. This is the stage that put fear into my heart. The entirety of Stage 2 is your character on a motorcycle with enemies coming at you from behind and the front. Like the second section in Stage 1 of Savage Halloween, you can shoot behind you as well as in front, but you are unable to lock your gun in any direction. After three attempts with Teddy, I began to feel that my run in this game was coming to an end, but I switched to Becca and remembered that I had grenades. Have I not mentioned grenades yet? Well, I would often forget about grenades because I would force myself to save them up for the end-of-stage bosses, but if I never made it to the end boss, there would be no point in saving them up. So once I realized that using grenades was integral to taking out the multiple armored cars, I finally made it through to Stage 3.
Sadly, Stage 2 was the only time that the level design diverged at all from the rest of the game, which was a little disappointing. Stages 1 and 3 - 7 consisted of more platforming and running and gunning. There was even a stage that incorporated a waterfall which seems obligatory for games that are based around 1980s action movies that inevitably take place in forests/jungles (First Blood, Commando, Predator), but there was nothing that was too either groundbreaking or at least nothing that was completely memorable. What did make these stages interesting were the boss fights, most of which had different tactics in how to approach them rather than just firing away and dodging enemy fire until they died. Some of the bosses like Big Boy and Papa Chicken were just a matter of recognizing their respective patterns and hitting them. From the third stage on, each boss started to have two forms with ever-so-slightly-altered patterns the second time around but it was not until the final stage that the game was finally difficult.
Stage 7 was oddly difficult and part of that was my own fault for trying to be as perfect as personally possible. Unlike previous stages, this one had two 1-Ups that were easy to acquire so that I could reach the final boss with a whopping five lives so that was one of the metrics I placed upon myself. Something related to the 1-Up was that it came early on in the stage, so if I lost a life after collecting it, I would respawn back at the beginning and since the 1-Up could only be collected once, I decided to exit out of the game and restart. In the second area of the stage, there was an elemental mechanic that was a one-hit kill and I would typically only die if I was knocked back by an enemy into the said mechanic, but otherwise, this second area was relatively easy. Following the second area, there was a mini-boss fight that I never liked, mainly because it felt like it was designed to eat up any special ammunition you had so that you would go into the final boss fight with very little if any special ammunition left. This felt especially frustrating because this mini-boss was not so much difficult as it was a bullet sponge.
Now, the final boss fight was pretty frustrating and for a while felt like I was not going to actually beat the game. I cycled through Becca back to Teddy, then to Jack, and finally played the generic male character, Finn. All of my multiple attempts with each character failed and I decided to give both Teddy and Becca one last attempt (these now being my 9-10th attempts on just the boss alone to say nothing of all of the exit/restarts. What made this fight so difficult was that you were given one type of special ammunition at the start of the fight, but the trick was that you were not required to pick it up until you wanted to. Since the first form of the boss was much easier to hit with the default gun, I would wait until the start of the second form to pick up the ammunition. Then, once the second form started, an ammunition reload drop was given along with another health item; the trick here is that the ammunition reload only works if you have special ammunition already equipped, so if you are using the default ammunition, this drop is effectively pointless. The boss' first form takes more than the 35ish (I do not recall the exact amount) rounds you receive and since there is no switching between ammunition types, you had to delay picking up the special ammunition as long as possible.
But you know, for all of my griping over the last three paragraphs, Biolab Wars was a lot of fun, partly from a design standpoint, seeing what 2nd Boss Games had come up with and where they would eventually improve upon in Savage Halloween, but also because it genuinely was a fun game. The music was on point the entire game, the graphics were era-appropriate and despite my own hangups on the final stage, the difficulty never felt so hard that I felt like I needed to replace a controller, and once I recognized patterns and mechanics for the final boss fight, it was just a matter of timing and patience. Savage Halloween was only released in October 2020, so it might be some time before we see a new game from them, but they are definitely a developer that I will be looking forward to for their next release.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Can Feel My Powers Slowly Returning
I Can Feel My Powers Slowly Returning
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