If you've been wondering where the great twin-stick shoot-em-ups have gone, you can be reassured to know you're not alone. Not because Witch Beam can offer you solidarity in your views, but because the Australian indie studio is trying to change all that with
Assault Android Cactus, coming to Steam, PS4, Wii U, and Vita. After sinking hours into the game's
Steam Early Access build, I'd say Witch Beam is onto something very promising.
"What we wanted to do [with
Assault Android Cactus] was make a really good twin-stick shooter in an arcade style because we don't think there's been one in half a decade or something," Witch Beam's Sanatana Mishra told me. "The last one that was really great for me was
Super Stardust HD. And I think, since then, we really need more."
Assault Android Cactus represents more than a (hopefully) really good twin-stick shooter to Witch Beam. It's a game the studio's three members felt they couldn't make when they were working together at Sega Studios Australia. There they put three years of their lives into
London 2012: The Official Video Game, a game Mishra isn't proud of: "It wasn't very good."
He and his co-founders wanted to put their time into making games they really wanted to make, and so Witch Beam and
Assault Android Cactus came about. While settling on a shoot-em-up was perhaps a little circumstantial, since it was a game the studio could make using their savings and without outsourcing, it's clearly a genre that appeals to Mishra. When I asked him about the game's inspirations, he quickly rattled off the Dodonpachi series,
Deathsmiles, and old-school "arena" games like
Robotron 2084.
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