Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first stretch asks you to settle into a clean, old-school rhythm: move a mechanical bug-like craft across a scrolling stage, shoot forward, and avoid a stream of organic enemies. There is little clutter between you and that basic loop. If you like shooters that make your route through enemy traffic matter, Super Shooting Towns gets to the point quickly.

Its power-up design keeps that simplicity from becoming completely flat. You do not build a permanent secondary weapon loadout; instead, relatively rare pickups temporarily alter or strengthen your main shot. A backwards-firing upgrade can change how safely you can move through a crowd, while other boosts give you a short-lived reason to press your advantage. Because they do not last forever, you have to adapt once their effect ends rather than sleepwalk through the rest of a stage.

That restraint can also frustrate. You cannot count on assembling a favorite weapon setup, and the infrequency of power-ups means the base shot has to carry much of the work. The shooting is therefore more about steady control and making the most of brief openings than escalating into an unstoppable fireworks display. That will feel refreshingly direct if you enjoy stripped-down arcade shooters, but it may feel stingy if you want constant upgrades.

The editor is where Super Shooting Towns earns its special place. You can draw your own side-scrolling maps and alter enemy parameters, including their difficulty, then see how your ideas hold up in play. That is more than a novelty attached to the menu: it lets you turn your opinions about pacing and challenge into a stage someone can actually survive—or suffer through.

Start by making a short level and testing it repeatedly. The useful lesson here is that enemy placement and tuning carry a lot of weight when the player has limited, temporary upgrades. Anyone willing to tinker can get much more out of the editor than someone who only clears the included stages once.

Graphics

The action is viewed from the side as the mechanical, bug-like player craft flies through stages inhabited by organic, predominantly insect-like creatures. That machine-versus-creature contrast gives the shooting a pleasantly strange flavor, even within a straightforward scrolling format.

Story

Super Shooting Towns does not lean on elaborate narrative framing. The immediate setup is clear enough to play: you pilot a flying mechanical device through hostile stages filled with organic creatures, fighting your way forward.

That simple conflict fits the game’s arcade focus. You are not stopping to parse a complicated plot between encounters; the sense of progress comes from pushing through each level and dealing with whatever enemy arrangement lies ahead.

The strongest bit of personality comes from the contrast between your artificial-looking craft and the insect-like opposition. It gives the action a specific, offbeat image rather than making it feel like anonymous target practice, even if the story remains intentionally light.

Overall Experience

Super Shooting Towns is a compact shooter with a better hook than its basic premise initially suggests. On a first play, its temporary power-ups and no-nonsense scrolling action make it a solid test of movement and shot management. The payoff is not a deep combat system; it is the satisfaction of learning to survive without being handed a lasting safety net.

The editor changes the recommendation considerably. If you enjoy making levels, adjusting enemy difficulty, and discovering how small changes can reshape a shooter stage, this is easy to recommend as an inventive piece of game-making software wrapped around an arcade game. It invites you to become a critic of its challenge design, then gives you the tools to try doing better yourself.

If you only want a shooter with a large selection of permanent weapons and constant mechanical surprises, the limited upgrade structure may wear thin. But if a focused horizontal shooter and a practical stage editor sound like a satisfying combination, Super Shooting Towns is worth your time. Its strongest idea is not that it lets you shoot through someone else’s levels; it is that it lets you build the kind of gauntlet you would want to master.

Retro Replay Score

7/10