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Guxt is a shoot 'em up masterpiece recently released by Pixel, the creator of the top freeware platformer 'Doukutsu' (otherwise known by the Western world as Cave Story). Being Japanese in origin, I have absolutely no idea what the name of the attacking forces or my ship are, whose home-world I'm defending or much else for that matter. But these things aren't important, because we are overlooking something far more urgent; in Guxt I get to blow seven shades of crap out of stuff with lots of big blammo-blammo guns! Woo-hoo!

After starting the program, noting the very small play window and fiddling a little with the convenient options to get the game running at a size that felt comfortable (and it's very flexible, with up to 5x pixel-zoom and optional full-screen mode), the main menu appears with only two of its four options available; the player can either choose to start blasting or configure the fire and pause buttons on their controller whilst the greyed features are 'score attack' and 'ranking' and we'll get to them in a bit. Going into battle for the first time finds us in very familiar territory; the ship is a bit slow to start with but a speed up soon presents itself, soon followed by a couple of power up weapons to make kicking some proverbial arse a bit more workable and, after a few practice goes to learn the territory, work out techniques for dealing with bosses and getting a feel for the various power-ups, the five levels should be fairly easy to despatch.

And that's where the fun starts because completing the entire game the first time through is what unlocks the other play mode. Score attack is exactly what it says on the tin and is a call to arms for the more hardcore players because the game only issues one ship and your mission, should you decide to accept it, is racking up the highest score possible. At first glance, Guxt isn't particularly generous on the scoring front, most kills give about ten points and there are a lot of destructible nasties and background details like asteroids that don't give any score at all! But as you get further into it, various score whoring strategies and carefully (and sometimes amusingly) hidden bonuses begin to appear and there's a real sense of achievement to be had from finding the optimal ways to rack up points. Of course, as the emphasis shifts from merely surviving the battle to attempting to fly as perfect a round as possible, there'll also be a lot of frustration as well, and a few very choice words were aimed at the little... erm, 'darlings' attacking my ship when a power-up or hidden bonus slipped past without being grabbed for the points or, even worse, the one life gets well and truly broken, but it's got that wonderful, indefinable something that makes simply slapping the escape key and storming off very hard indeed and I repeatedly found myself thinking that yes the ship blew up, but this bloody time I'm going to get that extra bonus and survive, thereafter hitting fire and starting another game.

The various worlds of Guxt are rather nicely presented graphically and, although the retro feel means that everything is rendered in a mere seven or eight colours and that most of said colours are fairly sedate shades of grey or blue, what it has in there is very presentable and clear, with the bullets that the enemies fire very heavily delineated by having a bright and un-subtle red glow - thus making threat identification a lot easier. I suspect that the overall feel is meant to vaguely resemble a Gameboy, and if so it works rather well and is certainly more effective than the overall styling of the other shoot 'em up I played for this issue (Pulse Blade). Another highlight is Guxt's audio - the music in particular; it's absolutely spot on for the atmosphere it's trying to create, sounds almost like a Megadrive game and I particularly love the third level and game over/highscore tunes (the former of which is playing as I write and it's memorable enough that I've found myself humming it a few times over the last couple of days).

So how can I sum this up, then? Well, it's an all-out blast fest that is very well aware and rightly proud of its roots, certainly looks the part with nicely drawn, clear graphics and it sounds excellent. But as we seem to say a lot, the most important thing here is always the playability and Guxt does seriously well on that front; it can be played either as a quick "dip in" kind of game or the longer term challenge of the score attack can consume a couple of hours play time without you even noticing that they've gone. In short, Guxt is a game for just about every card-carrying shoot 'em up fan but only the hardened pros will get anywhere near to truly completing the thing. There's nothing truly innovative here, but who cares? Big guns, plenty of stuff to blast and it does the job beautifully.