Actually, I couldn't summarize the game better than the developer himself, who put it like this: "A spoonful of Asteroids, a pinch of Geometry Wars, a load of shooty shooty." This pretty much nails it, the latter in particular because you'll never stop shooting once you start any of the six game modes. Your task according to the developer: "Destroy the universe in a rainbow of sugar rush colours, viewed through psychedelic sunglasses in a cheap 80’s nightclub." This dev knows how to intrigue me.
The heart of the game is Echoes mode, in which you progress through 10 levels, each one introducing a new threat to the player. You'll start out easy with just a few asteroids to blast out of existence, but soon enough the screen starts filling up with different and more challenging enemy types. Things start to get really interesting at around level six, when asteroid snakes start following you relentlessly and the space to navigate gets ever more crowded. Not long after, you'll get sucked into black holes, chased by planetoids and burned by blazing suns until you're overwhelmed by the absolute chaos surrounding you. Shouldn't come as a surprise that the universe isn't too fond of getting destroyed, therefore fighting back with all it has. But don't worry: using a gamepad, the controls are spot-on, allowing to swiftly needle through these stellar hazards.
Occasionally, killed enemies drop power-ups, which increase the power and spread of your weapon and restore lost ship energy. If you care about your score, make sure to hit the shooting stars randomly soaring across the screen. They drop multipliers, which are essential to getting your score up and your name on the leaderboards. But for an average gamer like me, it's nothing but intimidating to see how utterly out of reach the scores on there are for me. At least, there are four difficulties to pick from, but anything above Normal is way beyond my skills. Funny how much I like this game considering how much I suck at it.
The other game modes are variations on Echoes such as Time Attack (3 minutes to score as high as possible) and Survival (endure as long as possible with one life) or focus on specific enemy types like asteroid snakes and meteor waves. Classic mode is exactly what its name promises: a throwback to old-school Asteroids with green monochrome graphics and inertia-based controls that are completely different from the rest of the game. There are also 100 achievement-like challenges called Trials spread across the various modes, so there's quite a lot of content to sink your teeth into if you're that type of gamer.
Overall, this free game is a well-rounded, impressive package, featuring colorful neon retro aesthetics with an insane amount of objects and particles on screen. A scanline filter emulates old CRT screens, which is a nice detail but unfortunately can't be switched off. There's also quite a bit of screen-shake when things explode, which they do. A lot. The soundtrack consists of only a few tracks, so the music gets repetetive rather quickly. Nevertheless, the pumping electro beats are a perfect fit for the action and serve their purpose of increasing the player's adrenaline level very well. Echoes+ is an audio-visual rush for your senses and its frantic gameplay will keep you on the edge of your seat until that unforgiving Game Over appears on the screen. But you will simply hit the Retry button to fail better the next time and enjoy the intense rush all over again. And again. And again. And again...