First, the correct name of the game is W-Ring: The Double Rings. What the "Double Rings" in the title refers to is anyone's guess; there is only one ring, not two, that circles around your ship.
Anyway, I love W-Ring, it's a great game! Very good graphics, good music, fun gameplay, it's good stuff. The game is short, but quite fun. The game is sort of like a Gradius game, and that is great because Gradius is my favorite shmup series. I really like W-Ring. However....
Well, on the default difficulty, W-Ring is a very easy game once you've played it a bit. I picked the game up a few weeks ago for the first time in a while and beat Normal difficulty on my first try! That almost never happens for me in games, and really shows how once you've learned the basics, beating Normal isn't hard at all even for those only okay at this genre.
However, Hard mode is an entirely different story. Hard mode is REALLY difficult. The final level is a super-hard challenge; after several days of trying, I eventually had to give up. I only managed to beat Hard thanks to the cheat mentioned in this thread about the game here on PCEFX:
http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=13095.msg258757#msg258757Without that code I did get to the final boss, and even almost killed him once, but one of the last bullets killed me, or something like that...argh, that was very frustrating. And of course I couldn't manage it again. I finally beat the game on Hard with the added shields that code gives you. There's no additional reward for it -- it's the same exact ending as Normal, and the game just loops again on Hard. (When you beat Normal, it loops over to the beginning of the game on Hard after the end sequence.)
So what makes the game, that last level in particular, so insanely difficult on Hard? Well, that stage is very narrow, and the enemies shoot lots of bullets. I'm sure some people could get through that with a lot less trouble than me, but I'm bad at bullet-hell games, and dodging a lot of tiny, fast-moving bullets which often blend in to the background becasue the colors are too similar is really difficult, particularly when you often have almost no room to maneuver in, and one single hit at any point is basically death, start the level over! At least the game has infinite continues. Sure, you have multiple lives, and hitpoints (if you get hit while you have a powerup you'll lose the weapon instead of dying), but if you want to actually finish the level, you basically NEED weapon powerups to make it through the waves of enemies and turrets unless you are VERY good at bullet-dodging, and there aren't a lot of them in this stage. The early levels have powerups all over the place, but that's not the case in the final level, for sure.
Oh yeah, and level 6, the final level, is basically two levels in one. You play through that level in the narrow tunnel, beat a boss at the end, warp to the weird space that is the final area, fight waves of enemies there, and then fight the final boss... but if you die in the weird-space "?" area and get game over? You go back ALL the way to the beginning of level 6. There is no checkpoint in what is effectively the final level. That's really, really cruel; if you could continue there after game over I'd have won for sure without needing the extra-shields cheat.
So yeah, W-Ring is kind of a weird case -- the game is very easy on Normal, but crushingly difficult on Hard. I like it anyway, but trying to beat Hared mode was very frustrating. It took longer than beating Zero Wing (TCD) did, and was less satisfying because I only managed to see the ending with that code. I should note, Zero Wing for TCD does have a checkpoint at the start of its final level! Had that game done what this game does and send you back to the start of the previous level if you die at the final boss... ARGH, that would have been so horrible... but this game does exactly that. Gah.
Overall I do like the game anyway, but maybe slightly less than before -- the bullets are too hard to see sometimes and blend in way too well with the backgrounds; the ring is hard to rely on as a shield because it's such a small target that I often just had to rely on chance for whether a bullet was going to harmlessly bounce off of the shield or hit me and kill me or take out my powerups (I didn't mention it above, but this is a huge issue! It makes the game hard to predict at times in ways that are very frustrating in such a precision-based genre.); and the enemies are too hard to kill unless you have powerups. This game is not balanced like Gradius so that the game is playable without powerups if you play well -- bosses will take longer to kill without powerups, etc. So yeah, it's a good game and I do really like it, but it's not quite as great as Gradius games are, it sometimes felt a bit random and unfair. The game is quite short, too; this is on the shorter end of shmups for the generation.
Still, the gameplay, weapons, graphics, music, variety, secrets (the hidden alternate versions of stages and weapons for example), usually good level designs, interesting enemies and bosses, etc. are all good, and it's a very fun game to play up until you reach level 6 of Hard difficulty. But getting through that last stage will quite likely take longer than the whole game up to that point; even with the code, it's really hard. Of course you could just say 'Normal is good enough, you don't get any additional reward for beating it on Hard or anything', and that's fair, but Normal is so easy that I, at least, wanted an additional challenge. Well, it sure delivered.
Topic: W Double Rings thread (Read 454 times)
