It’s time for our favourite pug to take off once more, and this time he’s going to SPAAAAAACE!
Super Space Pug is yet another game in the line of “Pug” titles on Steam. This time, our little pug has blasted off into space with only his… chest… gun… thing… and must avoid cats, mosquitos, and asteroids! Well, he tries to avoid all of this anyways, but apparently he hasn’t quite adapted to being in space. I can’t blame him, he is a pug trying to move about at super speed in space.
Super Space Pug is a side-scrolling space shooter (I don’t quite want to call it a bullet hell because it’s not really a full bullet hell). The only control you have access to is on your mouse (which can get quite interesting when your mouse dies while playing), and you’ll need to move your far-too-fast-to-actually-be-moving-in-space pug around the screen in order to avoid everything that is coming at you.
The hitboxes in Super Space Pug are absolutely atrocious. I lost quite a few lives simply from being hit by something that never actually touched me. I’d do what one would normally consider a good dodge and still end up getting hit by whatever it was that was near me. Your “bullets”, which will either be a single fireball, three fireballs, ninja stars, or poop depending on what powerup you last grabbed, can hit the objects coming at you (except for the stuff the cats and mosquitos send out), allowing you to score points.
As I just mentioned, Super Space Pug comes with a variety of pickups you can grab. These pickups will sometimes appear when you destroy things on the screen. Assuming you are able to safely make it to the item – the poor hitboxes will often find you losing a life simply getting to these things – you will gain bonuses such as the previously mentioned shot types, a temporary shield, a score multiplier, and a speed boost. Should you die, you will lose all obtained powerups and have to start fresh. You’ll also occasionally level up (making the game harder), though I’m not quite sure what causes this to happen.
One thing I noticed right off the bat – besides Windows 10 asking me to install DirectPlay in order to play the game – was that there is no options menu. There’s no unlockables either. The game launches in a fullscreen-windowed window (at least on a 1920×1080 monitor), and there appears to be absolutely no way to change this. I’m someone who doesn’t exactly like having their games be fullscreen, even in a fullscreen-windowed situation, except for very few exceptions. I like having control of what resolution I can play my games at, and is something I hope to find in PC games I play in this day and age.
As I mentioned, Super Space Pug features no unlockable items. This is a major step down from the past two Pug games where there was a handful of other pugs (or animals in general) that you could unlock. It also proves to be an issue as the default pug is black… in space… with asteroid that are black. The pug has a hard time standing out thanks to the colour that it is, and could really do with a colour change (or other unlockable characters in general).
Then there’s the leaderboards. The leaderboards for Super Space Pug will take you out of the game to a separate leaderboard. So, instead of having it actually be in the game, they instead chose to host these on a different page. This leaderboard also only shows the top 10 players, with no way to find any other scores. When you finish a level, you are presented with a prompt to submit your score or cancel out. While it only happened once, there was a time after I finished a run (and had done a fair few runs before hand) that when I pressed “Cancel” it just completely closed the game.
Super Space Pug is a Super Space Mess. The game is lacking in a lot of polish when compared to the past couple Pug games. The hitboxes are all over the place (making it far too easy to simply die), there’s no extra characters to unlock this time which leaves you with a black pug in space, the game has absolutely no options menu, and on top of all that it appears to have some flickering issues. The flickering issues for some of the textures (namely the planets in the background and the bottom “line”) may be a Windows 10 issue, but I don’t have an easy (lag free) way to test on another OS. My suggestion is to avoid this pug game and simple stick with the original Turbo Pug. If you’re in the market for a kind of bullet hell game then there are plenty out there on Steam that have a lot more polish.
Super Space Pug Review Score
1/5
