Developer.....Studio 3DO Publisher.....Telstar Players.......1 Difficulty....Medium to almost impossible
SF3000 did brilliant (although rather unsung) things on the lowly Archimedes, and, to an extent, on the 3DO as well. Due to the Saturn's massively superior hardware, you would expect this to be great. That's what you'd think anyway…
It's a 3D texture-mapped shooter and set, not surprisingly, in the 31st century. With your powerful (albeit experimental) craft, you start off as a cadet and, in order to gain promotion, you must complete fifteen levels of increasing difficulty. As there are four ranks, there are 60 levels to play, which is pretty big, and most are quite long, which is nice. Obviously, you need to destroy the alien invaders. Heard that before? I thought you'd say that…
The graphics are functional if little else. There's a nice depth-cueing effect that gives the illusion of fog and thus hides any pop-up, the lighting is nice, and your craft can move at a fair old rate. There are a few alternate camera angles, the 3D is generally solid and the explosions use transparent sprite effects which look simple, but nice in a 'techie' sort of way. However, the plus points really end there. The frame rate isn't always great, and the textures aren't really as detailed as you'd like. Stray polygons from structures tend to obscure you when you get too close, which doesn't help at all. The game isn't amazingly colourful, and sometimes the collision-detection is rather questionable. But what hurts is the fact that the video clips and transparent labels of the 3DO version are missing (but they're shown in the handbook on the screenshots). The Saturn is perfectly capable of handling video and translucent effects, as the Saturn BIOS screen itself shows! The visuals aren't bad as a whole, but devoid of any sparkle that the machine is capable of producing.
The sound is better. The FX are realistic and there's a decent selection of tunes. You can also select the tracks to be played in game. The use of speech to describe each and every mission is nice too.
The gameplay is a little hit-and-miss really. It is a very big game, with a huge challenge, but some missions are downright frustrating. It doesn't help when you have almost finished a mission and get hit by a bullet that was nowhere near you, and it certainly doesn't help when the mission is over and you collide with the mother ship when you have to land! The craft tends to be a little hard to control (one of the reasons why the game is as hard as it is). Perseverance is the key, I suppose. The lack of options is a downer too, and it would have been nice to have a set of skill levels.
Basically, it's a fair game, with some very good missions and nice sound, but it fails to understand what system it is running on. What could have been a storm is only a moderately good game. It can be enjoyable, but critics (myself included) will be poking holes in the graphics and wondering what could have been achieved if the makers just spent a little more time exploring the Saturn's power. But we can't have everything in life, can we? A competent game, if a little flawed. Nice if you can find it too.
Graphics: 76% Sound: 85% Originality: 46% Playability: 80% Lastability: 85%
Overall: 81%
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