Have you ever wondered what it’s like to have propaganda blasted straight into your retina? I do. Oooh, I do. This week’s game, Glory Glory, comes to us courtesy of the developer Fire Clap. And the devs make sure that not a nanosecond can pass where an American flag is not visible on screen. You’d think the US military produced this game at the height of the cold war, but no, it’s a retro style shoot-em-up from 2013. Let’s get into it.
I give Glory Glory ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 stars)
What I’m about to show you has not been edited in any way. This is genuinely how the game looks from start to…well we’ll get to that later.
You play as a patriotic pilot fighting against an endless onslaught of communist stars, roses, hammer and sickles, and a recurring boss: Large Marx. It’s just a low-res version of that one Marx photo.
Every single weapon, health pick up, extra life, menu, and so on is plastered with the good ol’ red white and blue. When you adjust the game’s volume it plays the national anthem. The game over screen is a casket with the flag draped over it.
Speaking of the game over screen, you’re going to see it a lot. This game has no sense of balance or fairness to it. You take up a huge portion of the screen and the enemies will spam bullets that you cannot possibly dodge. And you have a maximum of 3 lives. Picking up extras beyond that just gives you money which you cannot use to purchase more lives. And when you inevitably lose your last life, you are sent back to stage 1.
So no, I did not finish this game. The farthest I got was stage 11. I don’t know how many stages there are and there’s no footage of anyone playing this game past stage 3. I might literally be the only human to have ever seen these levels aside from the devs.
It’d be easy to give this game 1 star. It’d be easy to end the review here. It’d be easy to write this game off as utter tripe and go on with my day. But there’s effort put in here. Someone cared about this game enough to make it a finished product.
The game has a plot.
This utter piece of garbage has a story it wants to tell. No one will ever hear it. And in spite of standing against everything this game stands for, I want to share this story and talk about it.
The part where I spoil the game
In the first few stages you are given orders by Northup, the cowboy hat-wearing president of America, to stop the oncoming invasion of red forces. By the fourth stage you’ve gotten orders directly from the CIA, via a portrait of a woman with her eyes and name censored by a black bar, to leave American airspace and take on a stealth mission to destroy a weapon’s silo in Ruddia. See, they changed Russia to Ruddia. Isn’t it clever?
I don’t know why the game specifies that this is a stealth mission, because the stage is absolutely packed to the gills with enemies.
When you get to the silo you find Northup there, fulfilling an arms deal. That’s why I feel the need to talk about this game’s plot. It’s a game about McCarthyism as if McCarthyism was a good thing because even the most powerful person in America might be a secret communist. The president escapes and you spend the next several levels chasing him down until your CIA contact is eventually revealed to also be a secret communist when it’s revealed that she was piloting Large Marx all along.
I don’t know what happens after that. My prediction is that in an accidentally based maneuver you turn your plane around to fight against the US air force. Though the game would justify it with “All of Congress is communist” probably.
This idea of not being able to trust the systems you used to rely on pervades the later levels. They’re made nearly impossible because resources and power ups randomly become booby traps. You have to either get extremely lucky and get no whammies, or avoid all the things that would potentially benefit you and pray that you don’t get hit too many times. Despite all of this, the aesthetic of the game does not change. You are still adorned in the American flag from head to toe, from cockpit to tail rudder.
I wish the devs learned a different lesson from their anxieties about heading into an uncertain world after the multiple financial crises and corruption scandals we’ve faced in the past couple decades. Instead they seemed to have internalized the belief that we just need more true patriots who believe more than ever in an America free from the corruption of “outside forces” infiltrating positions of power.