Tesla Force Review (PlayStation 4)
With science as your superpower, charge up your coils, and zap into action! Tesla Force is a rogue-lite top-down shooter featuring endless procedural gameplay with tentacle splitting action. Play as Tesla, Curie, Lovecraft, and Shelley and blast the cosmic horror back into the galactic abyss!
Pros:
- Decent graphics.
- 413MB download size.
- Platinum trophy.
- Cross-buy with a free upgrade to PlayStation 5.
- Camera view-normal, classic, and top-down.
- Can rebind controls, set auto-fire, and dead zone slider along with vibration-on/off.
- Twin-stick shooter gameplay.
- Comic book style cutscenes.
- Can skip cutscenes.
- Opening tutorial.
- Mech- collect the four pieces to make a powerful Mech that you can drop in and use.
- Two playable characters- Tesla and Marie Curie who have unique stats and abilities.
- Hub to buy and unlock new abilities and weapons.
- Roguelike elements such as progress are lost on death but you can collect currencies to unlock permanent items and abilities.
- Crystal’s and energy cells are currency and drop randomly in-game.
- New game plus support for more challenge every time you finish the game it gets harder.
- Unlock a third playable character-Mary Shelley and the fourth character…Lovecraft.
- Simple controls.
- The story has 3 chapters and every life the level select map will randomize the levels available and paths you can choose.
- Perks-everytime you finish a level you pick one of two random perks that stay for that life.
- On-screen markers and text pop-ups.
- Health drops from enemies as do new guns.
- Clock-as you finish levels and kill enemies this clock moves forward which makes the game harder by giving random buffs to the enemies.
- Can keep playing after finishing the level.
- Tons of replay value.
- Your health carries over to each level.
- Earn new items to show up in future games by playing and it counts it up after a run, kind of works like exp and leveling up.
- Four-player local co-op support.
- Big boss battles.
- New enemies come in overtime.
- Mech lasts X amount of time. (can be extended and upgraded)
- Fast loading times.
- Save and quit option.
- Kill combo.
Cons:
- Hard to see health as it’s a small number in the corner of the screen.
- Slight learning curve.
- Slowdown happens a lot.
- Slow-paced for unlocks.
- Variety is not the strongest part.
- Shooting is not always fun, the window of hitting enemies is small.
- No online Co-op.
- Can be hard to see Interactive points.
- Small text in-game.
- Graphics - 7/107/10
- Sound - 7/107/10
- Accessibility - 7/107/10
- Length - 7/107/10
- Fun Factor - 7/107/10
Summary
Tesla Force is a twin-stick shooter set in the tesla Lovecraft era. For the most part, it plays just fine, enemies randomly drop power-ups, abilities, and health and the controls are simple enough that it’s hard to fault the core gameplay. They inject a roguelike element to proceedings by making every life a run, levels are randomized on the level select map and no game is ever the same. You of course can collect currency to buy permanent unlocks such as a new character, abilities, max health and how the map works. As you finish levels you get to pick one of two randomized perks and it does import a cool feature of a doom clock that increases the difficulty when you kill and finish levels. It all sounds just fine but in reality, it’s a very slow-paced game unlock wise, shooting wise it’s very fast but unlocks take time, you have many many failed runs to go through before the better unlocks make an impact, boss battles are crazy hard starting out and it’s a question more about do you have the desire to grind out better gear and abilities or not? Level variety is there but it’s randomized so it can be a mixed bag. I liked the setting and the enemies and in truth, the shooting is good fun but it’s the progress and general lack of variety that ultimately stopped my advancement in the game. Overall Tesla Force is a good shooter but has constant issues with the progression and grind nature of unlocks.
