| paleface [sys=GBA; cat=Shooter_Vert; reg=NA] |
| | | Nice graphics for a GBA game with the whole psuedo 3D tunnel scrolling thing going on, and the music is no slouch either. As far as vertical shooter gameplay goes, though, Iridion II isn't really a threat to any of the recent PS2 ports, to say the least. It's nice to have a vert shooter on GBA, and the German dev team really went all out with different modes and things to keep you busy, but some of the gameplay systems aren't quite my thing.
For instance, you've got a very large health meter and can take a good number of hits before dying. This encourages sloppy play in my book as you can literally just smash right through a few obstacles or enemies and be pretty much none the worse for wear. Of course it may have been a necessity because of the way in which the tilted play field makes it difficult to judge the range and direction of incoming bullets.
The main thing that leaves me puzzled, though, is the weapon system: your little ship has six or so different weapons, each of which can be powered up in three stages. Powerups only come in one generic flavor and you can hold them for later use. If your current weapon is fully charged up and you activate a powerup, you get a good deal of health back. So why you wouldn't just power up your favorite weapon and save the rest of the powerups for health, I can't tell; it feels like an enormous loose end having all these unused weapons tagging along.
The boss patterns are not particularly impressive and there hasn't yet been an occasion in which I felt the need to use a bomb--of course it helps that you can arrange your little side guns in such a position as to block most incoming shots. I'm not keen on the huge number of little obstacles and things you have to dodge around, and there's a lot of dead time where there's nothing in particular to shoot at and you're just kind of flying along past static obstacles.
Oh well maybe it picks up later, the Internet code thing seems neat (lack of flash save sucks bigtime however) so I guess I should try to see if I can get a high enough score to rank in on the web site. |
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