Is life pretty in the future? Does CellZenith achieve its goal to topple Geometry Wars as the top downloadable shooter? Find out in our full video review.

CellZenith is hard to define. It’s marketed as “the next Geometry Wars” although we really don’t think it is like GW at all. The best definition would be a 3rd person SHMUP in an arena like setting. It consists of a 30 level campaign and a few mini games.

Check out the Casualty Gamer Video Review

The story for the campaign starts as your character is stranded on Neptune after his transport carrier is shot down by a mysterious force. It’s up to you to find your way home and uncover who was behind the attack.

From the get go, one of the biggest problems with CellZenith is that the environment is very bland. You see the same textures repeated everywhere and it doesn’t help that all the ships look really out of place in the environment.

We have had a fair bit of back and forth discussion among the CG staff regarding CellZenith, and we keep stumbling on the point of whether we should recommend people buy the game. Sadly, we always come to the same conclusion. No. As much as we wanted to see this scrappy little underdog succeed where so many others have failed we can’t honestly recommend our readers buy this game.

Why? Firstly it suffers from a horribly bad camera angle. It isn’t something that just happens occasionally, it’s a constant throughout the entire game. You can change the camera angle and zoom in, but even the alternate camera angles are bad, often obscuring enemies and giving no clear visibility of what’s ahead.

The game may be 30 levels long but the environment is very boring and bland. There is nothing pretty or even remotely interesting to look at. It reminds us of the games that came out when 3D graphic cards first hit the market, almost like a tech demo. They tried to make it artistic by making the ships 2 dimensional on the 3D backgrounds but they just look out of place. More like pancakes than ships. The artists may have been going for a retro feel here, but it really just ends up looking cheap in the end.

That’s enough dwelling on the negative aspects, though. There are a few positives here. The minigames are decent, the storyline is interesting, the controls are solid for the most part, if a bit touchy at times and the ship upgrades and power ups work well.

We’re not flaming this game for fun and we wouldn’t go as far as to call it a bad game but we think the overall package isn’t really enjoyable. We do realise this is a budget game, but when you are competing against games like Geometry Wars, Bullet Candy, Everyday Shooter and Audio surf, which are all less then half the price, CellZenith just doesn’t hold up.

In Conclusion, we’re somewhat curious as to why this game is being compared to Geo Wars and how it is getting such good ratings.

CellZenith will release on September 30th and is exclusive to Direct2Drive / Gamersgate. Perhaps not the best format for an indie game with little to no advertising budget. We’re recommending you avoid this one unless you’re really hard up for some overhead shooting action.

*Due to a legal threat, certain parts of this post have been altered.