Space Galaga International Edition is bogged down by weird controls and superfluous mechanics that overall just burden it with useless padding. The core game could be interesting - a galaga-like arcade shooter where you acquire new gear and upgrade it, with stats and pilots and a progression, but instead making you collect currency to buy and fuse stuff while you spend more time opening space chests and messing around menus trying to figure out what's useful and what's not. I thought I might have an okay time with this game, but in the end, I didn't.
After a bunch of story beats - which feel out of place in a galaga game - you're thrown into a weird mixture of old-school arcade shooting with strange mechanics bolted on top. The way you move your ship is extremely weird. You can move + shoot at the same time or pick some middle ground where you can do both separately. Both methods have their failings. The move + shoot system is the one I would use... if the game didn't have a ammo system. You can't just shoot continuously, you have to wait for your ammo to refill. So having separate zones for movement and shooting might seem like a good plan, but enemies are always on the move and why wouldn't you want to always be shooting in such a game? Instead of ammo, it would've been better to have a reasonable fire rate, but let you shoot continuously.
The levels themselves are waves after waves of enemies massing at the top of the screen to either dash at you or shoot bullets in your direction. You get points from defeating them - which do nothing, they're not even experience points - and sometimes capsules float by. No matter if you get five or twenty capsules during a map, you'll have to open them all one by one at the end, and in all cases, mine only contained currency. Why not just give open them all in one go? Why not just give the currency directly? Why not just give gear and forego the currency system entirely?
You use that cash to buy new weapons, bodies and other one-use items, but they don't change much. I bought a completely different type of weapon - missiles instead of bullets - and all it changed was the sprite on the actual projectile. Why not make different weapons with various attack patterns, strengths and weaknesses that you can unlock and play with quickly instead of having to wait a certain number of missions and/or grind for currency?
Anyways, not much else to say about SGIE, there's a clunky core of an arcade shooter in there surrounded by layer upon layer of useless menus. A pure-er version of that game might have been really cool, but that's not what this is.
