While I love innovative ideas and new takes on old genres, it’s also absolutely true not everything works out in the end. Whether the issue is the idea itself, or perhaps how it’s implemented, the eShop is full of hot takes on established game styles that simply aren’t very interesting or fun. Overpowered 1 does valiantly try to change things up with the way a traditional twin-stick arcade shooter works, and despite some problems I was down to give it some time to see if it would come together. Unfortunately, for me it never really did.

The hook here is that rather than being in a static arena, where power-ups will appear as you either shoot enemies or are simply dropped at random, you’ll need to explore and seek them out in a maze-like apparently underground area. Most of the time they’ll be behind some sort of barrier, and in order to get to them you’ll need to step on what’s essentially a play button on the ground to initiate a few rounds of enemies coming at you. If you’re able to survive, that will then remove some of the invisible walls in the area and you’ll be able to pick up things like added shots and improved firing speed. Once you’ve managed to make your way around, finding and then clearing all of the impromptu arenas, you’ll complete the current mission and move onto the next one.

While this does make for novel play, there are a number of issues that get in the way of easy enjoyment. The first issue is that everything is unnecessarily dark, which actually at times made it a challenge for me to work out where I was going in the first place. Maybe the desire was to somehow make the different enemies look a little more intimidating, but between rounds they could always turn on a dim light or two to avoid a needless issue. The other problem is that even as you get into deeper missions, and new monsters add new challenges, I wouldn’t say that the action ever becomes particularly compelling or memorable. Early in each mission, before you’ve gotten powered up, you’ll be more challenged than once you’ve picked up some steam, but much of this just feels like old hat in the end, with nothing you pick up being terribly exciting either.

I do appreciate the fact that I can’t say I’ve played a shooter with this sort of flow before, but I’m also not sure it made much of a case for this being a great idea. Perhaps if there were some crazier weapons, or innovative ways to make each mission feel more distinctive outside of a few different monster types, it could have been more fun, but it really just doesn’t do much to scratch my shooting action itch when compared to loads of its contemporaries.