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| mini-review: Ikaruga by FABIO 05/05/2003, 11:47pm PDT | ||||
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| Premise- A Gradius-like, old school style scrolling shooter utilizing the visuals of modern Nintendo hardware.
Result- A Gradius-like shooter that fails to include many of the elements that make this genre fun. The main gameplay element is the fact that enemies in the game come in 2 colors: black and white. The player can change his ship's color from black to white and back again with the press of a button. Getting hit with a projectile of the same color results in you absorbing it and adding it to your power meter. Getting hit with one of the opposite color kills you. Killing an enemy of the opposite color gives you double points (which are worthless because you get unlimited continues). Another button unleashes all your stored power into heat seeking missiles, one missile per bar filled up. That's it. There's nothing else to this game, not one single thing. No powerups or extras aside from the whole absorbing thing. What's a shoot'em up without powerups? There's also no real dodging, there are simply too many projectiles on screen at once to avoid them all. All you can do is change to the right color and match whatever color projectile is currently wailing on you. The game quickly breaks down into holding down the fire button and hitting the "change color" button every half second like some kind of speed freak Othello match. The background visuals are great, but you'll most likely never notice because you're too busy keeping track of what screen-filling projectile color you currently have to match. When bosses explode, the game slows down to a crawl until the explosion clears. I'm not sure if this is intentional or not but it gets kind of annoying. I'm all for some slowdown in shooters, Metal Slug rules when there's so much crap on the screen at once, but this is a friggin turn based crawl. Perhaps most jarring of all is the length of the game; the entire thing takes about 20 minutes from start to finish with no other modes available. Most 8-bit shooters last longer than that, you could even find several freeware titles that extend past that. It'd be one thing if it were an incredible intense 20 minutes, but they're not. The original Gradius games (and their offshoot, Lifeforce/Salamander) with both longer and more fun, not to mention "free" these days. Don't even bother renting this one. |
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