Tesla Vs. Lovecraft | PS4 Review
Twin-stick shooters have always been a guilty pleasure of mine. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, a twin-stick shooter is a game where you use the left stick on your controller to move and the right stick to shoot hordes of enemies. They are usually easy enough that I can sit and turn my brain off while playing. Tesla Vs. Lovecraft is not one of those twin-stick shooters.
When the title screen pops up, you are greeted to music that will literally blow out your sub-woofer. The bass was so loud, I could feel it in my chest. Which, to be honest, only made me more excited for the carnage to come.
After your heart resumes a normal rhythm and you hit ‘A’ to jump headfirst into Tesla Vs.Lovecraft, you are shown a snippet of a story that vaguely explains why the two men hate each other. I had to remind myself that I was here to simply kill monsters, not to worry about how lacking the story elements were. After a Super Mario Bros. 3 style of level select, I was off.
The first few levels of the game were the basic tutorial levels that I’ve come to expect in modern gaming. Tesla’s workshop is on fire and you need to grab his backpack (which, by the way, lets you teleport). The backpack has three charges that can be used as fast as you can hit the button, and each charge has its own cooldown.
The last level in the tutorial section introduces Tesla’s mech, which is indeed as awesome as it sounds. Mounted with two miniguns, the mech makes mowing down monsters a breeze. As all overpowered weapons should be, the mech is timed, so be sure to take out as many monsters as you can. You will start every new level in the mech after discovering it. After the timer expires, the awesome piece of machinery explodes into six different chunks that can be collected and reassembled at will to start the timer over again and help you balance the playing field.
Each level itself is an arena of sorts, meaning there is no beginning and no end. You are in the level with the sole purpose of killing every monster that spawns. This can range from exceedingly easy to extremely hard in the span of one level right after another. The easiest levels were the ones that would introduce a new monster. In these levels, the single new type of monster were usually the only ones that I needed to worry about. It was the levels that would combine four or even five types of monsters that got me to the point of rage-quitting a few times. After every level, you earn a new power-up or weapon that can randomly drop in the levels to come.
Each stage also has its own level-up system. You will start over at level one each time and as you gain enough experience, you can cash in your level-ups to get different perks such as 30% more health or faster reload, lasting the duration of that single stage.
Tesla Vs. Lovecraft Final Verdict
After powering through the 33 levels that make up the game, you finally get to the showdown with Lovecraft. This level is excruciatingly difficult and I didn’t feel any sense of accomplishment for beating it. There will be points where there will be almost as many monsters as there is map to walk on. I won’t spoil anything here, but beating the final level leads to 2 more ‘planes of existence’ (playthroughs basically) that essentially repeat the core game over again. Except as these things go, these are much harder and much less fair.
All in all, Tesla Vs. Lovecraft is definitely a game I would pick up just to kill time between my next gaming binge.
This review is based of of an PS$ review copy provided by 10tons Ltd. for coverage purposes.
Pros
- Tight Gameplay
- Plenty of Content
- Epic Music
Cons
- Difficulty Curve
- Lack of Story
- Random Drops
