The reviews for it were doing things that people want reviewers to do with reviews - actually ding the scores based on products being released broken. Bugs that would kill your forward progress in the game and you'd have to start over. The game also had some literal game breaking bugs. They improved the acceleration curve in a post-launch patch which improved game feel somewhat. It felt just absolutely horrible to play. When Prey came out, it had a really bad acceleration curve on analogue stick movement in addition to the pretty bad input lag. Prey's reviews don't match the game that exists now compared to the game that existed at launch. I mean, in those two games you're a guy walking around a city, so. edit- Oh, and Space Giraffe is Tempest in the same way Yakuza is Grand Theft Auto. The rest is learning how the enemies all fit together, with each new one adding not just a new type of threat but also a change to the gameplay, like enemy bullets you can shoot back down to the bottom of the screen for a major post-level scoring bonus. There's a lot more to it than that (the number of 'tails' coming from the claw/giraffe indicates how many times you can jump off the web to either escape danger or earn a bit of power zone, for example) but that's the basics. Space Giraffe drops you into an arcade zen in a way no other game can match, but there's no question there's a learning curve. The real trick to the game is that the audio cues eventually become every big as important as what you see, with the game purposefully throwing in effects to obscure the visual but somehow leaving the board fully readable anyway. With a good herd up top and a little bit of power zone, you then crash on through everyone sending them flying for major scoring. Shooting is automatic but the real point is to keep the power zone, a glowing section of the web, extended as far as possible by taking out a couple of enemies while the rest travel to the top of web. Space Giraffe starts off like just another round of Tempest but the problem is Minter had never done a tutorial before so it's absolutely terrible.

Prey metacritic