TESLA VS LOVECRAFT UPGRADE

Scattered around the level are new weapons which get progressively more powerful as you gather them, moving up from the starting pistol into electrically powered laser weaponry. Eventually, you get upgrades that damage enemies you dash through, but the onslaught of foes means your best bet is to keep moving, and either way you only have two real options.Īpart from movement, weaponry and power-ups are a huge part of the experience. The tactic I just described is basically the only way you use it.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much nuance with the teleport. This move has limited charges and runs on a cooldown, so you will need to be careful with how you use it. Given the dozens of enemies on screen at any moment, you spend the majority of your time on the run, playing defensively with judicious use of the teleport. In tense moments you will find yourself running away to pull your enemies into an area only to teleport away, leaving yourself much more room to play with. The teleport maneuver allows you to move through enemies and barriers and skip over small gaps in the ground.

TESLA VS LOVECRAFT UPGRADE

These are complicated by an early upgrade you receive in the form of a teleport. The controls are typical of the twin-stick genre, allowing you to move and shoot in separate directions.

Much like the story, there are many ideas contained within this game which could have made for a unique and memorable experience, but they end up being poorly developed, instead making the game a fun distraction. That gameplay is entertaining, but simplistic. The concept is more of a backdrop for the twin-stick gameplay, and it never took the chance to step forward and explore its own potential. The dearth of material on the story left me disappointed, however. Even this limited concept could have been interesting pitting optimistic technological innovation against nihilistic ritual magic. Lovecraft is up to something mysterious, causing wave after wave of eldritch abomination to pour into our world, leaving Nikola Tesla to mow through them with ever-increasing ferocity. Through the course of a scant few cutscenes presented via still images and some questionably voice-acted lines, we understand that H.P. That doesn’t influence my feelings on this game profoundly, because story took a back seat to gameplay to the point where it is nearly non-present. We need to stop making Cthulhu plushies, and we need to present Lovecraft as the nuanced and often unapproachable man that he was.īro I don’t know where to begin on that one We must face the contradictions of someone who expresses so much genius and so much ignorance with the same penstroke. I am one of the biggest fans of his works that there is, but it is intellectually dishonest not to grapple with these complexities. Lovecraft himself was a tremendous racist and anti-semite, whose beliefs were so backwards that even as a sheltered man from New England in the early 20th century he was considered an alarming bigot. His writings were works of a disturbed mind, painting the world as an amoral torment where understanding truth could only lead to pain and insanity.

I feel I have to address something, for our culture in general more than this game specifically: we need to stop treating H.P. Lovecraft in a blaze of weaponry, explosions, and undersea nightmares. The essential conceit is precisely what it says on the tin: this twin stick shooter places beloved inventor Nikola Tesla against the monolithic horror author H.P. Those moments are, strange as it may sound, far too numerous, rendering the experience into a numbing grind even as it presents you with flashy baubles at every turn. It’s moments of boisterous insanity like that which give Tesla vs. If you’ve ever wanted to plow through hundreds of deep ones on the back of a machine gun-toting mech only to hop out of it, teleport around, and fire off a death ray while radiating poison and generating a lightning storm, you now have your chance.

Tesla vs lovecraft