With the dawn of this generation of consoles we have been blessed with the ability to have long lists of downloadable games from Xbox Live, the Playstation Network and Nintendo’s Virtual Console/Wii Ware mix. With all these great marketplaces for these various consoles have come an absolute glut of spacey, high intensity shooters. This is great news for those who remember playing classics like R-Type, Gradius and 1942. The only problem is how to find out which shooters are the ones worth playing. In the PSN’s case, you can pick from Super Stardust HD, NovaStrike, Blast Works, 1942 Joint Strike, and the list goes on and on. Hopefully I can make the choice easier. If you only buy one shooter from the PSN, this is the one to buy.
Super Stardust is just like any other shooter before it. It is super fast, has tons of enemies and various weapons to try to avoid certain death. The 2 main things that are done differently are the battlefield and rocks. There are lots of falling rocks. Typically with these shooters you get a top down perspective and you either watch the screen scroll from left to right or top to bottom. Here, the battlefield is mapped to a 3d sphere with a grid. So instead of only being bound to the size of your screen, you have movement over the entire field of play at all times. This makes things easier and somehow at the same time, more difficult, than other games in the genre. It’s easier because you can always run away from an enemy or a cluster of rocks. But then it’s harder because if you go to fast to another side of the planet, and aren’t paying close attention, you will more than likely run into something. The other element that feels original is that there aren’t just enemies here. You constantly have falling rocks coming on top of you that you have to move out of the way from. Then, when they land, you use your blaster to break apart the rocks so that they no longer get in your way. This element isn’t really all that original though, as it’s really just taking what happened in Asteroids and putting it onto a 3d sphere.
This is where the developer tried to add some strategy, but unfortunately I feel that this element failed. There are three different blasters for three different kind of rocks. You have a Gold Melter for Gold Rock, Ice Blaster for Glaciers and finally you have the Rock Crusher for plain old Rocks. The theory here is that it’s best to use the Rock Crusher to blast Rock’s and so on, so forth for the other weapon/rock combos. While the idea is fine, it’s not executed, at all. What most good players will tell you is to level up your Gold Melter as fast as possible (through pick-ups’ that are left floating from blasted rocks) and then the other two blasters are far less important. The reason that the Gold Melter is so strong is that it is a constant flow, almost like an energy beam. Imagine a streamlined blast of fire coming from your ship. What this means is that you can whip the stream around your ship very quickly, almost creating a shield, and blowing up most of what’s around you in the process. The lack of balance in the blasters doesn’t really hurt the title, but it could have been done better.
I mentioned power ups and pick ups, and there are plenty. The majority of pickups come from rock that you blast with your cannon of choice. From blasted rock you will get pick up’s like additional ships, shields, points and power ups for each weapon. When an additional ship icon is broken from a rock you have so many seconds to get it, then it will pulsate and turn into a shield. Same foes with the weapon power ups. The power up may come from a rock in the form of a Rock Crusher upgrade, but if you wait a few seconds it will turn into another weapon power. This does add a bit of strategy as once you get a weapon to 100%, you can pick up that weapon upgrade again going into overdrive on that weapon. This makes your blaster burn hotter or shoot faster and only lasts 30 seconds or so. When the weapon is in overdrive the difference is noticeable in how much faster it kills enemies or blasts rock.
The only other two abilities your ship has besides the weapons, is a boost and bombs. Your boost will shoot your ship in whatever direction you are pointing, in a nice blue streak. Anything you run into will explode on contact. The boost is very helpful when trying to get out of a crowed area. You can’t spam the boost, which was a smart decision on the part of the game developer. Once you boost you have to wait until your boost meter (in the lower left hand corner) re-fills so that you can boost again. Bombs are probably even more helpful in that the blowup whatever is own the screen, with the exception of bosses. There is no timed meter, like with the boost, but you only get a handful of bombs on each stage so you do have to use them wisely.
While there are enemies, their variety is small in numbers. You can look at this one of two ways. The developer was lazy or the developer was trying to pay homage to so many games before it that it has borrowed from. The enemies include large gunships, strange space worms, circular ships with a spin attack and two forms of balls/crystals that slowly gravitate towards your ship. None of the enemies are difficult on there own. The difficulty lies in having 100s of enemies and rocks to avoid on the screen at the same time. Along with the 6 or 7 common enemies are three different bosses. You get a large circular space ship that spins and shoots purple matter at your ship, a long, flexible ship that shoots missiles and purple matter at your ship and then the final boss which is actually very easy and hard to describe. You might be trying to count this out, saying there are five levels, and shouldn’t there be five bosses? Instead of creating 5 bosses the developer got a little lazy and double up on circular space ships for level three and two long, flexible ships for level 4. Which the enemy design isn’t earth shattering in it’s originality, it really doesn’t matter. This game has too much going on to try and site and admire how creative the enemies are. You just want them dead and gone.
As far as gameplay modes, this one has everything a shooter fan can expect. There is your standard Arcade mode, which can be played on easy or normal. The goal here is to advance through 5 levels blasting enemies and rocks left and right. Each stage has a boss, which will provide a different challenge from the standard enemies. There is an endless mode, in which you try to survive for as long as possible. A bombing mode, which only lets you use bombs. For $5 extra you can get the Team Pack which adds multi-player functionality and deathmatch. The bulk of your time will be spent in Arcade mode, which is a blast to play over and over again to get the highest possible score. Also bolstering replay value is a trophy patch which came out right around the same time that PS3 introduced trophies. This, in fact, was the first game to add trophies and there are plenty here to keep you busy.
As always, the bottom line is should I put my hard earned cash down for this one? If you like shooters there is no question. For every Mars Matrix or Geometry Wars fan, this is a must have. If you were never into shooters, or always found their steep difficulty level to be frustrating, this is a pass. This game won’t change your opinion of the genre. But for $10 you get a great game that looks stellar and has trophies to boot. There really isn’t a reason not to own this.
