The first game out there from United Minds Games, Space Renegades: The Series, is a nice homage to the days of classic arcade shooters and 16-bit graphics. You take the role of one of two space pilots and hop into your ship for some action that’s one part Galaga and one part Space Invaders. It’s a nice style that you probably haven’t seen in a long time, if at all.

You can move your ship left and right across the bottom of the screen (and the edges spit you out the other side) while enemies slowly advance from the top. They fire at random intervals and often have backup ships crossing the screen horizontally too, so you have to stay on your toes and dodge as well as shoot. In each level you go through a number of lesser stages of enemies, and then engage a nasty boss in some story-related dialog before having an epic showdown. Pretty standard for space shooters.

What makes this game neat, though, is that you don’t really have lives. Instead, they have an interesting cash-based system. You start out with a fixed amount of cash and get more for each ship you shoot down. When you die, you have to spend a certain amount of your earned cash to buy a new ship and continue the level. Then, between levels you can spend any cash you have left on bombs and power-ups.

Be warned… this game is tough. Until you get the hang of it, you’ll be dying frequently and on the boss fights especially, but once you start getting the patterns down it can be pretty fun. The story is decent, although there are some minor graphics bugs. For example, I had the boy’s head displaying when I was playing the female star pilot for a while… it made some of the dialog pretty amusing. And it makes you switch between the keyboard for gameplay and the mouse for navigating the menus, which is a bit confusing at first.

All in all, it’s a good space shooter and a good first effort for United Minds. At just $8 for a price tag and considering you get two games in one, it’s at least worth your download. If you like it, you can keep it with hardly a dent in your wallet and blast enemy ships to your heart’s content.

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