I downloaded this game a couple of weeks ago. I was expecting something like Gradius V. I was wrong.
Oh, so very wrong!
This game feels so amateurish. It's like a game maker game made by some dood who's never made a game before. The backgrounds are mostly nice-looking, but the sprites and more importantly the projectiles and explosions look incredibly poor. Take a brush in photoshop and make an orange circle, then use many more shades of similiar color and make more circles within that circle and there you have a typical Söldner X explosion.
The gameplay itself is also very dull. All you ever do is fly forward, there are no obstacles or large ships/other things in your way - all you get is a wide open screen with many small ships coming from the right, and they pretty much just fly straight through the screen. If you ignore then they just fly by, and a new batch of small ships comes from the right. They put NO effort into this!
And another thing... some people might be attracted by the "awesome HD graphics!" but it really isn't in favor of the game at all. Sure, the resolution is (relatively) high for a shooter, but they don't take advantage of this at all - the enemy ships are super small, and so is yours, but the playfield is HUGE! This is a great disadvantage as it makes this feel like a game of Galaga/Galaxian - your tiny ship is to the left of the screen and on the right side are hundreds of small weak enemy ships. Kill all of them and a new batch comes along. JUST like Galaga!
In addition, the game doesn't support higher resolutions than 1280x1024 (I believe it was that), which sucks for those of us with flat screen monitors larger than 17". The PC version does have one nice feature though - no installation required. Just put in the CD and click PLAY on the autostart menu that pops up. Nice.
Oh and another thing... The GUI is scattered all over the screen, so if you have a large TV/monitor, you're going to have to look around for the various meters and stuff. I don't know about you, but I never had the opportunity to take a look at the GUI, I was too busy avoiding enemy ships. Oh, and there's a life bar somewhere, but I never found it. So expect to die unexpectedly.
As for the music, well, it's just very uninspired and flat (not to mention terrible!) techno music. Whoever made it has no talent whatsoever. Or they just didn't care enough.
And about the weapons. Don't expect anything fancy like in more sophisticated console shooters. They are very boring and there's no feeling in them eiher. You can get a big lightning weapon that's relatively large and looks deadly - but it just saps the energy out of the enemy ships - slowly. By the looks of it, it would blow everything up immediately - but it doesn't.
I played this in co-op with a friend, and the life bar seems to be shared, as we both died EXACTLY at the same time. That kinda sucks.
Beware of this game, don't let the pretty backgrounds deceive you, the gameplay is terrible. As I said, I was expecting something in the vein of Gradius V, but instead all I got was Galaga 2.0. A real disappointment.
2/5
You'll never see a scene like this in Söldner X
Topic: Soldner-X: Himmelsstürmer finally arrived... (Read 333 times)
