Bullet Candy Perfect is a shmup (shorthand for "shoot 'em up, inexplicably), a game in which tons of things are trying to kill you, tons of other things are good to touch, and they're all happening at the same time so it's really difficult sometimes to tell which is which.

You pilot a small ship confined to a small screen. You maneuver this ship by means of the WASD keys, but you aim and shoot with the mouse. At first, this might seem to be a godsend -- you don't have to face the same direction as you shoot, what a bonus! Now I won't have to worry about colliding with the enemy while I'm trying to shoot him! However, in practice it actually means that you frequently lose track of which onscreen item is your ship, and which is your targeting reticle. So you might be keeping your eye on the reticle, taking out enemies left and right, and suddenly fly right into a hail of energy because you were so intent on shooting properly. Ehnh, it happens.

Essentially, you shoot things that come at you. Different enemies behave differently -- there are kamikaze enemies that fly right at you; enemies that take multiple hits to kill; enemies that fire off an insane number of lasers, creating a net of death that's difficult to negotiate safely, etc.

But on your side is your rapid-fire gun, and a host of powerups to collect that help you in your fight against the universe. The powerups are coded by color, like so: Yellow -- score bonuses. Red -- extra lives. Blue -- upgrade your weapon to a triple-shot. Green -- invincibility, triple-shot, and lasers. These lasers are more powerful than your default shot, and can be had in two ways. First, grabbing the green powerup. Second, collecting pods.

Pods are tiny capsules floating through space. A number of them float about, and if you catch over half of them, your gun is automatically upgraded to lasers. Catching all of the pods initiates a smart bomb attack, destroying all the on-screen enemies at once. You also get points for each pod collected.

Speaking of score, there is a multiplier at play that really ramps up your points total. In the lower right-hand is a counter that tells you how many enemies you must destroy to raise the multiplier for that level. However, if you're killed, your multiplier drops back down to one and you lose your weapon upgrades. The only way to prevent this from happening is by pressing the right mouse button, which instantly destroys your own ship. Doing this preserves your multiplier and weapons, but at the cost of two lives instead of one.

At the end of the game, you're given a progress graph that tells you how well you've done compared to expected performance. Bullet Candy Perfect is a great little timewaster, especially if you're the paranoid type who already thinks that anything that touches you, kills you. Because here, most things do. You can pick it up right here at Big Download, for both Mac and PC.