The first game in the series only made it to America recently via the Wii’s Virtual Console. So we can be pretty happy that the second one came out here in a relatively timely matter.

The original on the N64 was a fun shooter in the veins of Star Fox, but with really confusing controls, since you had to control the character seperately from the cursor that you use to aim at enemies, it was a bit hard to manage (though not impossible once you got the hang of it). So the Wii release should logically correct that minor problem, and at the same time make for a very fun game.

Read on and see if it’s any good!

Developer: Treasure
Publisher: Nintendo
Date of Release: June 27th 2010
Platforms: Nintendo Wii

Genre: Arcade-style shooter
Rated T for Teen

Presentation
Surprisingly, the graphics suffer from similar problems lots of modern games have: the color palette is boring. Other than the bullets, the whole game is brown and gray. The areas are pretty much all boring to look at. The base built around a volcano is probably the most interesting area, and even that is mostly brown. The graphical quality itself is just above average Playstation 2 level, nothing overly impressive here. The character design is simple, basic anime stuff, with nothing unique. Overall I’ll say the game doesn’t look BAD, but it doesn’t look good either.

Sound-wise, the voice acting is okay in japanese (though the translation in the subtitles is pretty bad at times). There’s audio cues for most things going on on-screen, so you know when you’re hitting things and getting it, as well as bullets speeding towards you. The sound effects themselves are fine, shots sound like shots, sword slashes sound like sword slashes, everything sounds good and nothing is out-of-place.

Gameplay
One of the big problems, for me, were the controls in the N64 version. So let’s talk about this right away.

The controls here are super simple: You aim and attack with the Wiimote, move/dodge/jump with the nunchuk. Everything works really well. Where the N64′s controls were confusing and hard to use, the Wii controls feels very tight and natural. Instead of having to use buttons to move your character around, and other buttons to aim your cursor, now everything works near flawlessly using the Wiimote’s pointer, which makes it easier to move around properly while aiming at enemies. You can float in the air freely so you have a lot of freedom of movement. Dodging makes you quickly dash in the direction you’re going, and you’re invincible while dodging.

You have 3 attacks: A normal fast shot by holding the B button, which aims where you’re pointing, a sword slash if you just tap the B button and a Charged shot if you hold the A button long enough and let go. The charged attack deals big damage to bosses, and kills almost any other enemy in one hit, including everything in the target’s surroundings, but you need to wait a bit before being able to use it again. The sword slash only hits close to you, but, other than killing any normal enemy in one hit, it also stops most projectiles and reflects certain projectiles towards where you’re aiming. The normal shot isn’t nearly as strong as the average attack, but it’s more useful than the other attacks since it has a good range and can always be used. You can also press A near a target to lock-on, which makes your attacks home in on that target no matter where you aim, but it’s weaker than manually aiming.

You get points for killing enemies. You get point multipliers for killing enemies as well, increasing your score further. Getting hit reduces your multiplier. Bosses give bonus points depending on speed. When you finish a level, you get bonuses based on remaining HP, Time spent to finish the level and a bonus for every Secret found through a level. Secrets can be destroying certain objects, or doing something special against bosses. Learning everything in a level is required to get a good spot in the leaderboards.

A stand-out of the game is the fact that it has a lot of boss battles. Each of the 7 levels (not including the super-easy tutorial level) has multiple bosses, each harder than the last (heck, the final level is just a series of bosses). And they WILL kill you. A lot. Until you figure out their patterns that is. Each boss battle is fought differently and  each are fun to fight. I think this makes the game faster paced and more varied.

The game has 2 types of levels. Most of the time the levels that play sort of like a mix between Star Fox and Wild Guns, and others play like side-scrolling shooters. The both use the same type of controls, so going from one level style to another works perfectly. This adds a bit of gameplay variety.
There is one extra style of gameplay, but it’s only used in one of the boss fights late in the game and it SUCKS. While the whole game is a shooter, this one boss battle in level 6 suddenly becomes a fighting game with terrible controls… It’s stupid and pointless, but at least it’s not too hard when you figure out the timing.

Difficulty-wise… on your first playthrough, this game will kick your ass. Almost every boss will kill you a few times until you get a hang of their pattern. But it’s not unfair difficulty. Sure, you’ll die a lot, but there’s infinite continues and lots of checkpoints, so, the first time through the game, even if you die a lot, you won’t despair since you’ll always be right back where you died, or at least not too far from where you died. And there’s healing items too, though some levels barely have any of them, and others are full of them. But the real difficulty comes from getting up in the leaderboards. Now that’s a challenge, and, if you really get into it, could keep you occupied for quite a while. There’s a lot of trial-and-error involved in playing this game, but it’s very fun.

Overall
The presentation is a bit subpar, the story (which I didn’t mention in the review, for good reason) makes no sense and isn’t really interesting, but the gameplay is great and that’s all that matters for an arcade shooter.

The point of the game isn’t really finishing it, which should only take a few hours on your first playthrough, but to learn how to play the game as well as possible, until you can manage to finish levels without dying to get high scores. Getting high scores is very tough to do, and requires a lot of practice, even on lower difficulty levels.

There’s good challenge to be had here, with even the normal mode being real tough. The difficulty is never overwhelming on your first playthrough at least, as there’s a pretty high amount of checkpoints. Sure, some bosses take multiple tries to finish off, but a bit of practice and pattern-learning will get you through any of them in no time. The real challenge isn’t just finishing the game, it’s actually getting good at it.

The gameplay is solid, the challenge is good and the controls work great compared to the original version. This isn’t a must-have by any means, but it’s definitely worth checking out. It can become pretty addictive.

Pros and Cons
Pros
- Great controls
- Lots of replayability (if you get into it) with the online leaderboards
- Fair difficulty
- Really fun to play
- Rather long for an arcade-style shooter (can be both a pro and a con)

Cons
- Sometimes the difficulty is just a bit too intense, even on Normal mode
- If you somehow care about this(which makes no sense for an arcade shooter), the story sucks
- The stupid fighting game segment in the sixth level

The Save Factor
The game starts at $50, which I find a bit too high. If you plan on playing a lot and try to get high in the leaderboards spending $35-40 is fair. Otherwise, you shouldn’t spend much more than $20.

jobocan Console, Games, Review, wii