It is absolutely beautiful. No, really. The swirling, pulsating, translucent shimmery goodness that is Mutant Storm's graphics are somewhere between bio-organic and crystalline. They are not only completely lovely and free of graphical glitches and artifacts, but played without slow-down even on my laptop with default garbage graphics card. This is a two dimensional game field, but the graphics are lovingly rendered polygons. The camera swoops around and through the game world as you glide around the field and transition between levels. The color scheme is variable from game to game and also depending on what color you choose for your ship. The models are simple, but combined with the gorgeous... I don't know what you'd call them... plasma effects!? That sounds right... combined with these, you have layer upon layer of tripalicious eye candy. Even the main menu screen does amazing things with translucent layers, and if you're not impressed by the visuals, then you need therapy... really.

This game is extraordinarily challenging. Now, if you're like me and lack that insane degree of hand-eye-coordination required for most twitch games, you would expect to get completely smeared by this game... but you won't, at least not at first. The game has an adaptive difficulty setting. You cannot choose Beginner, Medium, @$#%ing Hard. As you progress through the game, building up multipliers and skating through levels unscathed by Mutant death, the little Mutants keep getting harder and more determined to cream you. If you start screwing up, they'll ease up on you a bit. Apparently, they don't like the taste of shame... just panic. You can see everything on the screen, and you have infinite bullets, so really, you will never be able to blame anything but your own hand-eye coordination for getting hosed.

The action is simple enough: One hand controls your ship's direction. You can move in 8 different directions at a constant speed. With your other hand, you'll control your spray of hot laser death. This can be performed with the mouse as default, or one of those fancy dual joysticks. I would suggest the latter if you can manage it, as I found the mouse-firing scheme to be difficult when making quick directional changes. The mouse control is absolute, too, so if you just hold down on the fire button while moving, you'll keep hitting the same point. If you target the center of the arena and move around the perimeter, you can be sure to hit just about any critter on the screen.

However, if you're sloppy, you'll probably not get as many points. Positioned in the different arenas are pulsating translucent cubes. Some arenas have none, some have at least 8. These are some type of weird gelatinous bonus things. If you hit them with bullets, they'll shrink. If you lay off the firepower, they'll slowly grow back. If you hit them enough times, however, they'll pop. For every one you have left at the end of a level, you'll get bonus points.

Every 10 levels, you'll reach a checkpoint. In-game, you'll get an extra life and an extra bomb. Out-of-game, this means that you can start over from this point in the future, should you be determined to reach the end and don't want to start from the beginning. I didn't use this feature very much, preferring the one-credit/one-game/no continues rule, but I found it very reassuring to have it there if I ever got frustrated.

The scoring system has different levels, but is rather simple. As you spray hot laser death into the Mutants, your little green meter at the top of the screen fills up. You can also bag glowing green power-ups to give your bonus meter a boost. When it fills up, you get a score multiplier. If you lose a life, you lose your multiplier and green juice. In addition is a belt system... yes, like karate. For every level you clear, you get a 3% boost. For every life you lose, you also lose 7% of your belt juice. Nail 100% and say hello to a new belt ranking, right up to black belt. I can only assume that this is very gratifying, because I've yet to get more than 30%.

Other extras include the choice of ships and ship colors. The ships each have different models and bullets, but I couldn't tell if there was any practical difference between them. Their bullets seemed to have the same range and damage, and none of the ships could take more than one hit before annihilation. I can only assume that there's only an aesthetic difference. The colors are extremely variable. You don't get to specifically "paint" your ship, but you can scroll through a very wide spectrum to find your favorite color.

I had a few problems with the menu system. When selecting ships or starting stage, mouse clicks would sometimes change options and sometimes advance to the next method. It's ironic that with a game with such excellent collision detection, the menu interface would be so flaky. However, this is a minor caveat that I give out only so you'll realize that this really is an impartial review, and that you should really, really play this game.