Jamestown+ (Playstation 4)

Vertical
Checkpoints OFF
5 Difficulty levels
7 Stages
Ship speed fixed, selectable st start
- - - - - - -
Developed by Final Form Games
Published by Limited Run Games in 2024

Culmination of a truly interesting labor of love in independent gaming, Jamestown+ or (Jamestown Plus) is the final iteration of a game developed four years earlier. While maintaining a firm grasp on pixel art and tried and true gameplay mechanics, it also encompasses several aspects of more modern functional design, namely a wide range of difficulties, single stage progression and unlockable side quests, as well as a special mode for those willing to play it as a true arcade-like experience. In essence, it has everyone covered in terms of how to have some shooting fun.

The game has a deep backstory that develops amidst a mix of ancient culture and advanced mechanical technology, in a steampunk setting that uses planet Mars as battle grounds. You take the role of a soldier who flees from a death sentence on Earth and goes on a quest to clean his name in the dangerous environments of Mars. It's all conveyed in quick panels between stages that can be regularly skipped, but you still get an idea of what's going on just by the stylish intro panels shown prior to each level. It all trickles down to the whole design, from floating islands to enemies and large bosses waiting at the end of every stage. Hint: enable Farce mode in the options for a more humorous take on the story. 

In the somewhat fractured structure of Jamestown +, everything starts with only one stage available for play in any of the four initial difficulties. By beating each consecutive stage you'll earn money (ducats) to purchase the access to ships and extra game modes/challenges. The game limits progression on purpose as things are unlocked and players have the possibility of trying out the different difficulty levels. As expected, ship selection is rather limited in the start, with only two of them available: Beam and Gunpowder. However, it doesn't take long to get the full armada, which consists of 10 different ships and two randomized choices.

Teaser trailer for Jamestown+ for the Playstation 4
(courtesy of YouTube user and digital publisher Playstation)

Each ship has three inputs available: shot, special and "vaunt". By default they're assigned to buttons ×, □ and ○, but prior to any gaming session you can easily rebind them at will. Styles vary a lot between ships with regards to firepower, special weapon and speed, so it's definitely recommended to try all of them and see which one works best for you. My favorite ones were Beam (for its DDP-style similarity), Charge (that big orb is extremely powerful) and Treason (fast + cool homing missiles). The Lazar ship is also very cool with its customizations, too bad the laser is weaker than Beam's. What's common to all of them is that there are no power-ups or enhancements of any kind. The only items you'll ever come across in Jamestown+ are those nut/gear-shaped gold tokens that provide extra points.

That's where the vaunt input comes into play. By collecting enough gold you fill up a meter that allows you to use it. Once activated, the meter starts to deplete while a multiplier of ×2 is applied to everything you score, destruction and new gold alike. The simple act of collecting more gold helps to refill and keep the meter full, with larger gold providing more recovery than small ones. Triggering vaunt has the added benefit of giving you a few seconds of invincibility while converting all bullets caught into its blast radius into points. Vaunt is lost either by allowing the meter to deplete or by pressing the vaunt button again, upon which you get blocked from activating it for a few seconds. No block is imposed if you let the meter deplete completely.

Even though vaunt is used primarily for scoring, it is naturally a very good resource for survival. After all, purposefully stopping vaunt mode also grants you another brief invincibility window, so going in and out of vaunt can be suitably timed to come out unscathed against some of the nastier enemy patterns in higher difficulties. That happens at the cost of some more points, considering that the longer you remain in vaunt mode the higher the bonus you'll collect is. From what I could check, the most points come from keeping long vaunt chains. Needless to say, keeping vaunt mode on for as long as you can requires some basic routing with timed destruction and smart item collection. When that's not possible it's of course always good to squeeze whatever you can from gold fountains, such as easily milking the first boss for example. Don't worry, all bosses time out after a while.

Forests and bullet-spewing spores in stage 3

It took me a little while to warm up to Jamestown+. It's an enjoyable game, but I guess I needed some time to cope with the painfully slow speed of my ship of choice (Beam). The game is very nice to look at, visually original, full of detail and quite varied from beginning to end with a superbly fitting soundtrack. It draws inspiration from many sources but mostly Cave, Konami and Compile, while successfully building a character of its own. The mission-based core game is a no-brainer for most people in terms of fun, with the added possibility of climbing the difficulty ladder at your own pace and having four players joining forces in local co-op. However, if you fancy a more "arcadey" experience the advice is to just head into Gauntlet mode as soon as you can.

Gauntlet makes players go through all levels in sequence in customary arcade style, with just one single extend granted with 2 million points. Gauntlet mode is comprised of five stages, while Super Gauntlet adds two extra levels which were developed after the initial Jamestown title came out (these extra levels and the complete ship set are the reason for the Plus in the title). A slight catch is that in order to go through all stages of Gauntlet or Super Gauntlet you need to at least play it in the Legendary difficulty, which is two levels above Normal. Legendary is sort of the expected standard of a manic / bullet hell hybrid, with Divine and Judgement reserved for those who feel comfortable with something that might resemble harder 2nd loops of famous arcade titles.

My main goal in Jamestown+ was to beat Super Gauntlet mode in the Legendary difficulty with the Beam ship. I pulled it off without losing lives, which seems to give you a substantial completion bonus as seen in the screen below. I just didn't get to know the exact rules to this bonus. I didn't care for the "challenge" modes, but they're there for those who have plenty of time to try everything this excellent independent shmup has to offer.