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Hermitgames’s Leave Home is everything that is good about shooters, indie games in general and shows the potentials of XBLIG. Why is it so good you might ask? Well lucky you, I’m here to explain.

Leave Home is a dynamic, scrolling, score attack shooter. This basically means that the “levels” take shape depending on how you play. You can simply describe it as “do good = more stuff” but there’s a bit more to it. The smoothness of the level progression is admirable and during my first couple of playthroughs I didn’t realize it got progressively harder the better I was doing. When I started learning the enemy and bullet patterns, thus scoring more points, I began to see the differences between a good and a bad playthrough. I don’t have all the details on how this works but when I did really well on level 3 I reached a new area I had never seen before and it was quite the revelation. There is much more under the hood than just “more points = more enemies” and it’s incredibly satisfying to explore this.

At heart Leave Home is a scrolling shooter with a lot of what comes with the genre. The side-scrolling first level has a distinct R-Type flavor, even similar enemy patterns. The fourth level feels like a nod towards Treasure’s Ikaruga, specifically it reminds me of chapter 4 a lot. A late part of level 2 is pretty much an homage to Jeff Minter’s unreleased Unity project for GameCube. The two bosses you face at the end are also very challenging and brings a definite bullet hell vibe to the game. Who knows, there might be even more to discover because I haven’t beaten the second of these bosses yet. Overall Leave Home feels like one big love letter to the shmup masters. One of the more original gameplay elements is the ability to split shots with the right trigger, nothing fancy but gives you a lot of extra control over your ship.

Leave Home is a fixed length game which essentially means a session will always take the same amount of time to complete. The beauty of this score attack mode of play is how it’s evolved in Leave Home as a result of the dynamic levels. If you do very good on level 3 for example you get to new parts of level 3 faster and these places generally have more possibilities to rack up a good score. The different ways you can play through a session, even though they’re all the same length, are staggering because of how the different stages change depending on how you do. If only XBLIG supported Leaderboards like XBLA does.. this would be the game to compete in.

Oh hey, did I mentioned that this game takes Rez and makes tough love to it to produce it’s graphic? The future-retro (yes, future-retro) flavor really makes the game pop out of the screen. Things explode into bursts of glowing particles and the clean cut shapes and black background work as great contrast to this light show. The music isn’t half bad either. Distorted squeaky acid basslines, glittering crunchy pads, Roland drum machines and other goodies go very well with the visuals and change seamlessly between levels.

So, if you didn’t get it from what I wrote, Leave Home is fucking fantastic. It’s arguably THE best game to ever hit Xbox Live Indie Games and for 240MS (3 PUNY EARTH DOLLARS!) it’s pretty much the deal of the forever. If you haven’t already bought it while reading I suggest you go do it now, just click this link to the Xbox Marketplace. Hermitgames deserves your money and you deserve this game. Thank me later.