An Honest Review on Galaga: A Video Game Review

When I was trying to write an editorial these past weeks, I found myself in a common dilemma; I didn't know what to write about.

I knew for one thing that I wanted it to be a review of some kind, but looking at the many options I had, I found barely any that would not result in a 2 hour read. I wanted to review something simple, yet iconic and complex enough that it could lead to a completely useless but ironically interesting read.

So, after many days of hard thinking and procrastinating whilst listening to Toby Fox music on repeat because I'm still in my Deltarune phase, I have decided to do an honest review on an ancient prehistoric masterpiece of an arcade video game known as Galaga.

Before we begin, let’s start with a basic idea on what the game is. Galaga is a top-down space shooting game released in 1981 developed by Namco (they also made Pac-Man and Tekken) where you play as a white and red spaceship. The goal of the game is to shoot down bug-like aliens and to get the high score of the day.

The game was one of the games developed in response to the great Space Invaders craze of the early 1980’s. It was not the first space shooter Namco made, though. Their first space shooter was a sort of prequel called Galaxian. Nobody cares for it, for it is merely just space invaders without the shield thingies and with colors.

I personally see Galaga as the “Better Version” of Galaxian. I believe the game was created in response to the problems that Galaxian had. Galaxian only had the same aliens recolored, so Galaga should have unique aliens in each row. Galaxian only lets you shoot one bullet at a time, so Galaga has a multifire button for rapid action, and the most important: Galaxian has no powerups, Galaga does!

Yes, the most important thing in this game in my opinion is, of course, the double spaceship powerup. This feature was most likely added because of the fact that Pac-Man kind of introduced this concept of power ups thanks to the Power Pellet. In Galaga, to acquire this power up, you need to let a certain alien steal your spaceship and then wait for it to attack you while in your next life. If you manage to shoot the alien down you will be able to rescue your spaceship and then you can combine into one, allowing you to shoot two bullets at a time.

Although the power up is very powerful and very important, it is EXTREMELY HARD to pull off. And in my opinion, it makes total sense. I believe that video games with overpowered items, weapons or power ups are hard to get yet super powerful because of Galaga. I think Galaga introduced the “OP Mechanic” that many iconic games have nowadays. I think that is, indeed, the most important and best thing about Galaga. It introduced Godlike powers in video games thanks to the double spaceship mechanic.

There is one other more minor but important thing about Galaga. It introduced bonus stages. In these early bones stages you had to shoot down aliens whilst they dance on the screen for about 40 seconds to get bonus points. This paved the way for bonus stages in later games which I believe is very cool.

There is only one common problem that I find with this game, the aliens' attack patterns are SUPER ANNOYING!! When the aliens attack the spaceship, they fly down in a circular motion and fire missiles at you. The missiles are fine, it’s just THE MOVEMENT. It makes it so hard to hit aliens, which is very frustrating.

But listen, with all that said, Galaga is an excellent video game that introduced many iconic features that later games would include in the future, and in my opinion, that makes a darn good game. I rate this game an 8.7/10