Developer: Beam Software Publisher: Data East Release: 02/90 Genre: Action
Dash Galaxy is a game that would normally suck me in based on its cover art alone. As a huge fan of comic books the box art and its depiction of a 60’s space man looks incredibly cool and I picked up the box to study the screenshots many times. But something always kept me from taking the plunge. Considering I wasted $50 on X-Men that says a lot. While Dash Galaxy is not as dire as that game my intuition would ultimately prove right. Dash Galaxy is a frustrating mess of a game with cool ideas that do not come together to form a complete and interesting package.
You are Dash Galaxy, space explorer extraordinaire. You are stranded on an alien planet thousands of light years from Earth and must now navigate a massive maze of floors in a hostile environment to reach your ship and hopefully go home. The premise is interesting and I respect what the designers were going for. But ultimately Dash Galaxy needed more polish to be worthwhile.
There are two phases in Dash Galaxy. Every floor begins in an elevator shaft from an overhead perspective. Each room is one big puzzle with blocks, force fields, and numerous rooms. Your oxygen is constantly depleting and also functions as your life bar and so you must enter one or all of the rooms to collect items to progress. Once you enter a room the game becomes a side-scrolling platformer. To leave you must turn off all switches which is easier said than done. Along the way you can collect important items such as oxygen flasks, extra lives, keys which deactivate force fields, and bombs. If you are lucky you might even find a warp zone or two to (hopefully) skip a few floors.
The platforming stages are the heart of the game and also where it falls apart. The controls are the biggest issue with Dash Galaxy. The game has the detailed animation of Prince of Persia but wants you to platform like Mario and the two do not mix. The physics are all over the place and ruin the game. I can see what they were going for. As I said before the animation is well done. But doing anything other than jumping upward is a problem. Walk a few steps and Dash will sprint. You can perform a running jump but judging your distance is hard. Dash can jump pretty far but the collision detection sucks. You will fall through more platforms than you would think possible. These issues are immediately apparent yet the game exists as is. Baffling.
Dash Galaxy is a long game. There are twenty-four floors, each with four sub rooms. However you do not have to explore it all in linear fashion. One of the game’s few good points is that you are left to plot your route to the end goal. It would be easy to visit every room on each floor to collect all their items. But instead it is wiser to use them strategically to make the journey brief. In most cases if you want you can reenter the elevator to skip a floor if you want. Eventually force fields or blocks will impede your progress. But a well-placed bomb from prior levels can easily bypass them. There are various warp zones that will skip floors or even send you back if you are unlucky too. I like this aspect of the game; I just wish it were better overall.
The difficulty is through the roof in this game but that is because it feels held together by duct tape. Although I just gave praise to its open structure it is also says a lot that the optimal route lets you complete the game in a little over ten minutes. So much of the game is empty fluff that is there to waste your time. I will give it credit; there is a lot of variety among the floors. It is just too bad you will want to skip most of it, especially any levels involving ice. My initial excitement at playing the game slowly turned to dread as the problems piled up until I was glad it was over.
In Closing
In spite of its myriad flaws (and they are many) I still want to like Dash Galaxy. But I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone. You would have to tolerate a lot of janky decisions and bad level design to appreciate its few good points. It is not worth it in the slightest. Sometimes a good idea is executed badly and Dash Galaxy is a prime candidate. Outside of its box art this is a forgettable game.
