Project Root

For fans of old-school arcade shooters, Project Root is flawed but fun. Your ship is nimble, your weapons are effective, and both can be upgraded, along with your shields, between each mission. You'll even be able to grab mid-mission power-ups that can repair your ship, temporarily boost your shields, or give you special weapons such as swarming missiles, a powerful laser beam, or an EMP pulse that temporarily deactivates your enemy’s weapons. All these weapons will be put to the test by both the variety and sheer number of enemies you'll face. Your missions also are varied and set in open battlefields that encourage you to explore, looking for secondary targets and other enemies to destroy.

Project Root is not without its problems, though. For starters, some of the sound effects are rather bland; exploding ships sound more like they're going "pop" than "BOOM!" Even worse, the game tells its story through low-rent-looking comic book-style pictures with no voice-overs. It also doesn't help that, in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions, the text in those comic panels, as well as in the prompts you see during the training mission, is so small that you won’t be able read it if you sit at a reasonable distance from your TV. And it’s only slightly better if you play the Vita version. Even worse, while a green arrow near your ship indicates where your main objective lies, it's so small and such a light shade of green that it’s hard to see, especially when you're flying over a forest, as you do in your first mission. All of which sometimes makes it hard to know where you're supposed to go and what to do once you get there. Even with these flaws, Project Root is still lots of fun, especially for old-school shooter fans.