If twitchy, precise reflexes aren’t really your thing, the shmups typically won’t be a genre for you. Weaving through the scant few millimeters of space you have between bullets and enemies can be just a bit much for folks like us. This is where Next Jump: Shmup Tactics (Next Jump) comes in, giving players a turn-based, tactical experience of the genre, letting us carefully plan out our bullet dodging and enemy shooting in advance.
Dragons have stolen the chosen drink of the elves, dwarves, and orcs, and so the latter take to their starships to get it back! Which is as good of a motivation as any to play through the various boards of Next Jump. Each one is procedurally generated, and will offer you a group of enemies all blasting away. It’s up to you to anticipate where these ships will move, where they’ll shoot, and how to best avoid and intercept them on each turn.
Retrieving your people’s holy drink won’t take terribly long, or at least, the individual turns won’t. Next Jump was designed to be played on a coffee break, so you can easily hop on, take out your enemies, and then hop back off in time to get back to something else.
If you can’t handle the idea of a sad orc, and you also need your shmup action coming at you a little more slowly and methodically, it’s well worth looking into.
Next Jump: Shmup Tactics is available for $ 4.99 on Steam. For more information on the game and developer Post Mortem Pixels, you can head to the game’s site or follow them on YouTube and Twitter.
