Sometimes, stripping things back to their simplest mechanics makes for a strangely more interesting game.
Other times, however, it just makes an otherwise vaguely interesting game a little more dull.

This is a great example of the latter.-=-=-

2009 - Platfire 2

The first Platfire game took an "Unlock" approach, starting the player off with a basic boring shooter, then progressively unlocking extra features as you played.
Unfortunately most people never bothered to play it that far, so all they got to see was the shitty basic boring shooter bit.
D'oh!

No matter. For the sequel I stripped out the Deluxe-Galaga style powerups, and made it 100% shooter.
I'll be honest, I'm not sure exactly why I did that. The powerups are half the fun!!
What remains is a simple You vs the Baddies fight to the death.
Baddies constantly respawn, and everything moves at a nice brisk pace.
It's quite a simple shooter, but it's not all that great.
There IS an online scoreboard, though! *sigh* Remember when I used to do things like that!!
This server couldn't cope with it nowadays! (*he says, as he pays for another year of the thing.. grr)

Anyhoo, it's not a terrible game, it's just not all that great.
You can Download Platfire 2 here for Windows.