VG Mad

Intake

System: PC and OSX
Developer: Cipher Prime
Publisher: Cipher Prime

03 Mar 2015

Intake launches with an awesome soundtrack and trippy visuals, immediately giving an arcade feel to it, both of which are a constant throughout the game.

Instructions given are extremely sparse, and take a few goes to understand the mechanics of the game. So here's a brief, but more descriptive guide.

Intake is a mouse based twitch shooter, that has pills dropping from the top of the screen in two colours. The crosshair can be switched between these colours with the right mouse button. To destroy a pill, the crosshair must be the colour of the pill you are going to shoot.

A shield is at the bottom of the screen, which will block any pill that isn't the colour of the crosshair. If a pill drops below the shield, and you fail to destroy it before it falls off the screen, you die of an overdose.

The aim is to stay alive as long as possible, while at the same time, building up a big combo. Should a pill hit your shield, your combo resets. Your combo also resets if you fail to hit a pill with a shot. The bigger the combo built up, the higher the end of round and in-game currency (aka MG - milligrams).

After level up you have to shoot the end of round MG pills as fast as possible. The more of these you get, the more chance you can buy a power-up at the pharmacy.

At game over, you can’t relax just yet, as often you get a bonus round with a heck of a lot of MG pills dropping down the screen, shoot as many as possible to collect them.

Visuals are stunning for what little simplicity there is. The pills and graphics in general, are vibrant neon colours, with smooth animation. A nice touch, is the screen responding to the bass.

Power-ups are available from the drugstore to help make the game easier, if you have enough MG pills. You may also buy additional in-game music from here with your MG Pills. You are able to alternate between these, so that eventually you will get a balance that you are happy with.

The only flaw with Intake, is the limited number of soundtracks. A local co-op or battle mode would also have been nice a nice addition.

A great concept for a seemingly simple game. You are likely only to play this for short periods of time, a casual twitch game, that requires great reflexes. Can definitely be added to the pile of games, used as a social gathering challenge.