Cosmic Fighters

Cosmic Fighters was a horizontal scrolling shooter developed by Kaleb D. Parham and published on Yoyo Games on November 12, 2009. It was Kaleb's first fully published game, breaking his record of announcing games and never making them. While it is silly, it can not be classified as a cute-em-up because of it's horror themes at the end.

Gameplay
Cosmic Fighters plays like most scrolling shooters to a certain degree. Like most scrolling shooters, the screen and level flies by the player who moves freely in all directions of the screen. The game offers a considerable amount of originality, however.

Shield System
The primary and most noticable difference between Cosmic Fighters is the lack of a crash bomb; a standard limited attack in most shoot em ups that clears the screen of all bullets and in some cases enemies. Instead, the player can deploy a shield with an infinite counter to protect there player from most attacks. The player can only deploy one shield at a time and cannot shoot through or cancel it. However, each shield has a timer before it dissapaers. Once it does, the player can instantly deploy another one.

Orange Shield
The player can eventually earn an orange shield which destroys all but one bullet, does damage to enemies, and allows the player to shoot through it.

RPG System
The player's firing power increases up to six levels based on the score. As the score goes up, the player earns more powerful shots. This replaces the find a power-up days, but allows the player to keep all power earned once killed instead of losing everything.

Level 1: The starting level. The player can only fire one shot every 5th of a second (5 shots a second).

Level 2: Reached after scoring 60,000pts, or generally after defeating the first boss, clownman. The player can now fire in three directions every 5th of a second (15 shots a second).

Level 3: Reached after scoring around 750,000 through 800,000 points, or generally in level 4 or 5 depending on the path taken. This awards the player with the orange shield.

Level 4: Reached after scoring around 1,500,000 points or generally towards the level before the last. The player earns the mega-shot. This replaces the middle thrid shot with a big but slow moving and powerful blade.

Level 5: Reached after scoring around 2,000,000 points or the last level if the player has died a considerable amount of times. This increases the rate of fire from 5 shots a second to 8 shots a second.

Final Level: It is physically impossible to reach this level if the player plays the game through and dies less than 20 times, as the score for this level is a near impossible 8,000,000 points. You would have to die 8 times on each level near the end of it as well as get all of the hidden locks three times and die again to achieve it. It makes all shots instant kill shots, excluding bosses, who require 10 to 12 hits.

Version 1.1
The original game loaded slowly, so this is nothing but an update

Version 1.5
This replaces every single level and song, and adds some overall gameplay changes

Version 1.6
This build really just makes it run faster and adds a few changes, including rebalanced difficulty

Pro Version
This will be the final update. It rebalances difficulty again, and adds two more fighters and two more shield types.

Reception
The game has had mixed reviews, but mostly positive.

Some have liked the game, while others have said it needs more expansion. Some have praised the graphics, while some don't like the graphics. Some say it it is decent, others say it is good.

The pro version has recieved more lack-luster reviws. It has recieved all 3's out of 5, whereas Cosmic Fighters 1.6 has recieved 3's and 4's out of 5.

Sequel and Remake
Kaleb has promised a sequel to the original game which will expand upon all aspects of gameplay, feature an original soundtrack, and will have better graphics.

Kaleb has also expressed interest in remaking the original Cosmic Fighters with better graphics and orginal music.