Retro Shooter Mala Petaka’s Demo hits Doom Fans with a Boom

Can it get even more old-school? With Mala Petaka, a retro shooter in the style of Doom awaits us, in which we shoot aliens which, with their 2D cartoon style, could come straight from a game of the early Nintendo era. Today, the developer released a demo that we tried out right away.

The so-called “Boomer Shooter” is being developed by Sanditio Bayu from Indonesia, known primarily as a graphic designer and pixel artist. However, he also worked on mods for Command & Conquer games or Doom at an early age. With Mala Petaka, Sanditio now brings both skills together because the game is based on the GZDoom engine, which in turn is a kind of modification of the original shooter from 1993.

The graphic talent of the developer comes into play in the visual implementation, which, with its colorful pixel style, stands out refreshingly from the dark surroundings of the classic.

In terms of gameplay, Mala Petaka remains true to the great role model. As Petaka, all we do is kicking alien butts and the reason is having amnesia and being angry. LOL. We should refresh our character’s memories little by little during the game, but it seems that Mala Petaka‘s story structure is still below the usual narrative density of typical shooters. That shouldn’t matter too much though, as long as the game feels right.

And thanks to the new engine and its improvements, the gameplay just feels great and, above all, familiar. It’s just fun to shoot at the aliens with the help of five different weapons (pistol, shotgun, machine gun, grenade launcher, plasma rifle), which are wonderfully absurd. For example, there’s a flying drone with big googly eyes called P.B.O.D, which stands for “Purple Ball Of Death.” Due to its style, Mala Petaka plays like “Doom on Acid”, including strafing to dodge enemy bullets, collecting color-coded keycards, and discovering secret stashes.

Mala Petaka is still in development, and it is not yet clear when the game will be released for PC, macOS, and Linux. Since the GZDoom engine cannot be ported to consoles, there will be no implementations for these platforms. However, you can try the free demo on itch.io and follow the developer on Twitter until the release.