Steel Storm: Burning Retribution
developed by Kot-in-Action Creative Artel (Del Rio, TX)
self-published May 11, 2011, for Windows/Mac/Linux, $14.99
[website]
[trailer]
~930 MB
[YouTube video of complete playthrough in 25 segments, 1 per level]
Played until declaring I was done, having completed 9 of 22+ levels, in 3.5 hours, 1/22/15–1/25/15.
The sixth of the six games in “Humble Indie Bundle 3” at the time of purchase on August 3, 2011.
Remember how I said I was gonna be quick about these entries? I still want that.
The game: an interesting genre mix that doesn’t work and thus isn’t actually interesting. Steel Storm combines the monotony of scrolling shooters with the monotony of first-person shooters, without the compensations of either: like Xevious and its many descendants, you face the same couple of dull enemies over and over and over, but without the trancelike momentum that makes those games work; like Wolfenstein 3D and its many descendants, your goals consist of a lot of dull lock-and-key busywork and backtracking, but without the atmospheric “what’s gonna be around this corner” tension that makes those games work. Not to mention without the compensation of any compelling narrative or meaningful progression of any kind. It’s a bunch of very old, basic, tried-and-true video game ideas, mixed and matched in a way that doesn’t have any intrinsic logic or reward.
There’s a functioning game here and it’s perfectly playable (barring a few irritations). There’s just no reason to play it; it has no identity other than the sum of its parts, and its parts are all old.
I get the impression that the ambition behind this game was status-seeking rather than artistic. That is, the creator’s driving vision was that he could be a person who made computer games. This is not actually a vision of computer games, and so has nothing to offer. I certainly know the feeling: the ambition to have written a novel, or a movie, or whatever, and thus be a person who can be proud of himself. This feeling stems from self-esteem issues/social anxiety and so can only propose form, never content. Filling out that form while keeping one’s eyes on the prize thus has to be done with no feeling for content, only for the social expectations placed on content. (Using the word “content” to describe the stuff of art is already symptomatic of this attitude.) This mindset accounts for the vast field of student films and student novels and student theatrical productions that show off elaborately without being anything.
Very occasionally this kind of thing ends up being successful all the same: either because a stopped clock is right twice a day and it gets lucky (I’m thinking of M. Night Shyamalan happening to make The Sixth Sense), or because the aesthetic somnambulism of anxiety-driven art generates something exceptionally strange and fresh — which is what “outsider art” is. Things like The Room or Manos: The Hands of Fate become beloved because they’re so thrillingly unattended by the conscious mind at the level of content, the conscious mind having been exclusively occupied with issues of self-esteem management. Outsider artists aren’t actually “artists so bad they’re good,” they’re non-artists whose ego-ideologies compel them to go through all the motions, including the ones that generate art. Anxiety makes pod people, and sometimes pod people make interesting objects.
But Steel Storm: Burning Retribution isn’t that interesting an object. It’s not surreal or unexpected or revealing or “so bad it’s good.” It’s very ordinary in all respects, and its pod-person egoism manifests itself in fairly ordinary ways. Among them the title, which is as good as parody — four words and one punctuation mark, none of which can be sensibly related to any other. The individual levels all have similar names, e.g. “Snowflakes Tempest: Numb Steel.”
The logo of “Kot-In-Action Creative Artel” is all ‘tude, a mega-badass cat with a mouse in its teeth. When you quit the game, the “are you sure” window always contains some slightly garbled trash-talk, such as “Don’t be a wussy!” The empty defiance of ‘tude is the hallmark of this kind of art I’m talking about — emotional expression as a status symbol, not a signifier. Kickassery is always something envied in another, and then affected. It’s not an actual feeling.
Kot-In-Action Creative Artel — I feel embarrassed just typing that — is really just one person, Alexander Zubov, who seems to be a Russian-American living in Texas. His Twitter self-description is “just an awesome indie game developer :)”. A lot of first- and second-generation immigrants carry the feeling that they have something to prove, which, as with The Room, is the path to missing the point. It is very clear from his postings on his site and around the web, regarding this game, that Alexander Zubov has plenty to prove, which is exactly why I don’t want him in charge of my entertainment.
Two other people are credited with Game Design: Clay Cameron and Forest Hale, and then a bunch of minor contributors.
I put in 3 hours. I get it. I wish Mr. Zubov luck with his next endeavor.