In the most recent flurry of festive finds littered about the PlayStation Store is the little gem that is PixelJunk Shooter which may well take the title for UFO Gamers' hidden treasure for 2009 in our Golden Saucers Awards feature (you're welcome to vote here).  For a mere £6.29, Shooter will furnish you with a marvellous new spin on the shooter genre in a way that only Q-Games' PixelJunk series can. 

Where you might think that the game looks like a revamped version of Asteroids of old, you would be sorely mistaken.  The game's premise is not simply shooting the crap out of incoming nasties and indeed you might come away as I have done considering Shooter as a misnomer.  Hit the click to find out why...
The shooting element takes perhaps an equal status, occasionally a back seat to the game's beautifully-constructed puzzle elements which largely revolve around a clever use of various materials which behave precisely as you would expect, so while there is a tutorial, you're really not going to need to use it unless you're a complete dribbly.  Drop water into lava and, if there's enough of it, the lava will become a rock that's so soft it could be mistaken for that Christmas song by Bon Jovi.  If gas comes in contact with fire or electrical arcs, it ignites; it's all very logical.  The whole concept is to rescue stranded little yellow men littered throughout the four or five parts of each stage.  Indeed, you have an infinite number of ships; the lives system revolves around how many of the stranded people are killed by enemies, friendly fire or by environmental dangers, such as lava or being crushed or encased in ice.  As if rescuing people wasn't enough, you've also got to take temperature into account.  Linger too long around lava and your ship will slowly overheat.  Conveniently, dripping icicles or caches of water can act to reduce your temperature and perhaps even rescuing you from certain destruction if your ship is aflame and falling to the ground.

Graphically, the game is like a peach: smooth, with an extra buffering layer of smoothness.  The cell-shaded cartoony style could quite easily have become tiresome by now, but it's executed beautifully in Shooter, with some background detail that just keeps you noticing little details here and there, bringing out yet another course of the feast for the senses that is PixelJunk Shooter.  There's some great coding behind how the liquids move, even down to how the water swells as your ship approaches the surface and as a result of the liquid being so freely open to your influence, some puzzles have a slight sandbox element to them where you might be able to be a little creative when solving them.

Like some well-meaning jogging partner, as the game progresses, so too do the puzzles.  Littered here and there throughout the stages of the three different sections of this part of the game (I say this because it ends with a 'to be continued' situation), are ship converters that modify your ship in some significant way.  There's the water suit, allowing you to spray jets of water to affect lava and fire-based enemies as well as forming ice.  Sadly, the water suit doesn't come with frog-eyed wellies, but while you wear it, the grabber you ordinarily use to rescue people can attach itself to great chunks of ice, allowing you to pull it away, transport it elsewhere or allow it to crumble.  The magma suit (no red cape or emblazoned M logo, I'm afraid) bestows upon you the dangerous lava tool.  You can shoot streams of lava at enemies or to melt ice.  Angle it too high and a lump of lava will begin to bubble atop the stream and eventually roll its merry way down, causing your ship to overheat and plummet, unless there's water in your descent trajectory, to your death.  The inverter suit doesn't make your manly bits into womanly bits but instead peculiarly makes a foe of water and an uneasy friend of lava.  Lurking in the mining complex stages, a new danger is lurking.  A shimmering magnetic black oil and the less said about this stuff the better.  To be frank, it did my bloody head in at times.  It follows you.  Aaah!  Creepy!

To provide a further gameplay dimension, the flora and fauna of the planet through which you're journeying hold some surprises in the form of grabbable round creatures that fall into two categories: firstly, there are water balloon-like sacs which hold a humourously ridiculous amount of water or lava; then there are sponges that when dropped into a liquid will make sweet little gulping noises as it sucks up whatever you've dropped it into.  When grappled, it releases its load in some bizarre take on helicopters putting out fires.  This, along with the magma suit makes for some interesting local two-player gaming.  I, for one, was getting enjoyably irate with Xander as we accidentally melted each other and had to begin that part of the stage again.  There was slapping and exchanges of the word "prick".  It was good fun!

There's a nice little storyline plodding along in the background, but like all good games that aren't really storyline reliant, all the exposition is entirely skippable, allowing you to get back to the action with only the slightest delay.  Trophies are also up for grabs in the game with a gratifying variety of difficulties.  To prolong your gaming experience, there are diamonds buried in the rock, the ice, the lava and the sneaky little hidden areas all throughout the game.  They unlock little prizes in PlayStation Home, which is a neat touch, or would be if Home ever makes it out of its beta stage. 

The game looks innocuously simple, but as you can tell by the length of this review, it's absolutely brimming with features that are introduced at a good pace; there's never a moment when you feel inundated with stuff to learn about; it's all so well done.  Even the boss battles, of which there are three, are a great balance of difficulty, scale and fun; at no point do they go on for too long and become tedious.  The only possible criticism I may have for this game is its brevity; it's too short for my liking, but then, it is to be continued.  If you look over the PixelJunk series or are familiar with it, then you may well think that this level of quality is to be expected and while a cynic might suggest that if you get in Shooter precisely what you expect, then they've done nothing new, but far from it; you get what you expect in Shooter because you're expecting something different and excellently executed and this is no bad thing at all.