I think Panzer Dragoon and Rez are some of the best games ever, so I went into this with pretty high hopes. After 10 or so credits, naturally I have no real verdict for it yet. Is it as good as the afformentioned games? Probably not.
I'm running it on an Export motherboard and the difficulty is currently set on Normal.
My first thought is that this game seems super cheap from stage 3 onwards.
The player character is huge and obstructs enemy characters and bullets, which is why I like to play in first person view. However, on the other hand, there's a huge emphasis on player movement and avoiding enemy fire, and playing in first person it can be hard to judge where the player character is in relation to the enemy bullets. I guess with subsequent plays this will be less of an issue.
However, what won't become less of an issue, is that if you get shot, the screen will shake violently. During this time it's very hard to see anything, which naturally leads to getting hit again. I've gone from five hearts to none in a matter of seconds.
There's three types of weapons at your disposal. A regular shot, a lock on and a bomb. I use the lock on pretty much exclusively. However, the lock on doesn't work on enemy bullets or item boxes (I'm still not sure if the regular weapon works on all enemy bullets). Bombs I try to avoid using at this time, because they don't seem to very plentiful. Saving them for later stages. Both regular shot and lock on can be fired at the same time, and I don't think there's any penalty for it (score or otherwise). There's a part in Stage 2 (in the forest with the yellow bubble mines) where there's a ton of enemies and item boxes where I hammer on the lock on while keeping regular shot on autofire.
Stage 1 can be no-missed pretty easily. Stage 2 has a few cheap parts and the boss can be somewhat tricky. Stage 3 though, bloody hell
From the fire breathing dragons to the charging turtles (?) to the absolutely ridiculous stage boss. Seriously, what the hell? (literally. It's set in lava caverns, so might as well be there) I have no idea how the boss should be tackled. I kept getting hit from below, from inside the turning structure. Maybe dive in right at the start?Game is hard.
Does anyone know if the JPN version is any easier? Another thought that occurred to me is that since this is originally a 2P game, maybe the difficulty doesn't scale down to 1P? Anyway, early days yet, maybe I'm just super bad at it.
Game looks amazing though. Sounds great as well. Well worth the effort of tracking down everything. The sitdown cabinet, the control panel lower, the control panel upper, the motherboard, the ROM board, the analog joystick, the analog joystick amp board; all were bought from different places!
