I was flipping through Game For Window’s feature on 101 Free Games the other day and RayHound quickly caught my eye. Turns out it’s another freebie from Hikware, the awesome dev behind titles such as Warning: Forever and Shooter’s Solitude. RayHound offers something pretty new though: You don’t actually have a gun. Instead, your ship releases a field which traps enemy lasers and redirects them, making them your own and under your control.
It’s a really interesting system to play with. Once lasers are caught in your field they become harmless to you. They’ll then follow you around under a sort of gravitational pull until released, or directed into an enemy turret. If you’ve grabbed a large amount of lasers, flying them into a ring of enemies may be a decent strategy. Often times it’s fastest to simply release the lasers at just the right time to slingshot them right back at the shooter. Either way, it’s a fairly deep mechanic.
Hikware really excels at putting a solid execution along with a fun concept. Like Warning: Forever, RayHound is something like what a sandbox game might be in the Shoot Em Up genre. Your only enemies are an ever increasing number of turrets and a countdown timer. The turrets grow in clusters as well as numbers, meaning more lasers simultaneously shot in increasingly complex patterns as well as more to dodge.
Instead of a life system, getting killed lowers your remaining time, while completing a stage increases it. At 0:00, it’s game over. While stage select every 10 levels is very welcomed, it would have been nice if one could have kept playing until death after 0:00, like in Warning: Forever.
