Soldner-X2: Final Prototype (PS Vita) Review
Released: May 25, 2010
Played: 7/17/2021
I was very interested in playing this game but never bit the bullet on it until Limited Run Games decided to release it physically for the PS Vita. While I'm not the biggest fan of playing shmups on handheld systems, and since I don't own a Vita TV to pipe the game onto my big screen, I was a little hesitant, but still a bit optimistic because of the good things I had heard about the game. Since I have been on a huge shmup kick for the last year or so, I was excited when it was selected from my backlog. I popped it into my Vita only to discover this game is the epitome of a euroshmup... I guess the umlauts in the title should have tipped me off.
I often use the the term, "euroshmup" in a way that seems to be more derogatory than I mean for it to be. There's nothing necessarily bad about a shmup that was developed in the style of other shmups created in Europe in the 80s and 90s. It's just sort of a blanket term to describe shmups that tend to have extra components that set them apart from their Japanese counterparts. These include life bars, shields, unlockable weapons, slow scrolling levels, and poorly planned enemy placement and bullet patterns. When the gameplay isn't very well tuned, you have to rely on these other features to make your game playable. While Soldner-X2 is guilty of some of these euroshmup features, it's by no means a grievous sinner. The lifebar is present as are plenty of healing items in the game. There are also plenty of walls of bullets and enemies, but they aren't as blanket like as many other poorly designed shooters. While your ship is pretty large and clunky you do have the ability to avoid a majority of the incoming shots in this game. It can be difficult, and you will meet the inevitable bombardment that sucks a bit off your lifebar. But, it's by no means overwhelming. You can really tell that the developers love and appreciate the genre themselves and just wanted to add some interesting elements into the game. It's just a shame that these elements are so sorely associated with subpar shooting games.
There's a bit of a story here to help carry you through the action. Apparently after the events of the first game (which I haven't played) Earth is trying to reunite under one universal banner. Unfortunately, one of the most powerful factions, the D'arg, don't like this and set out to stop this. You're then given a prototype Soldner ship and charged with the task of heading out there and destroying the D'arg. Obviously, it's a very basic story and is pretty standard for any shmup. It's not trying to break any ground in the storytelling department and that's totally fine. No one really plays these games for the story and anytime a developer tries to focus on a shmup story it usually feels shoehorned and gets in the way of the flow of the game. Honestly, I always feel sad about this. Maybe someday a developer will be able to fuse great shmup gameplay with engaging storytelling... but that certainly isn't the case here.
After the opening cutscene, you'll choose your ship and get dropped right into the action. Gameplay is a standard horizontal shmup. Right off the bat, you'll see that the game looks pretty great on the Vita. The ship models are sleek and crisp as are the enemies with a 2.5D look where the models are 3D rendered models put onto a 2D plane. Quite often this sort of art style can come back to bite the developers and look really dated. It evokes memories of that awkward time in the PS1/N64 era where everyone was fascinated with jamming as many 3D objects into every as possible. It's not a great look a lot of the time; which I believe is the reason most developers focus on the sprite based art style. Luckily, this game is able to pull off this look... but just barely. The scenery is nice as are the lighting effects but things can get pretty bland with the overall grey, light blue, and black color schemes you'll encounter again and again. The backgrounds are usually pretty interesting and seem to twist, turn, zig-zag, and flip all around while you play. Even though this makes the game more interesting to look at, you're still locked to the same 2D plane. You would think it would be very distracting, but unfortunately, the background action is so disconnected from the gameplay that you basically zone it out. One reviewer said that it looked like the actual gameplay was occurring in front of a green screen playing random junk. I concur. The game is often pretty bland in terms of the color pallet, but this helps the colorful hail of bullets stand out. Everything looks like generic sci-fi styling and it could have used a little originality injected into it. The game runs at a great 60 fps and I encountered no dips or slowdown in the framerate. So, it is a technically sound experience.
Each of the ships you can select have a different loadout and you can cycle between the weapons during gameplay. This is a cool idea, but many of the weapons feel pretty weak compared to the others and you'll find yourself ignoring many of them. Every ship has a final weapon that can be changed out by picking up different icons throughout the levels. You gather powerups to increase your firepower, but the sheer number of them you have to gather is insane. It takes dozens... maybe a hundred powerups to hit max power. Whenever you continue, you'll lose most of these and a bit of Gradius syndrome sets in. In case you didn't know, Gradius syndrome is when you die in a game and lose your powerups and cannot make anymore progress because the game is designed around you being fully powered up. This leads you to having to restart the game and have a perfect run without getting hit to make progress. Regardless of that, even if you have a perfect run, you never really feel very overpowered in this game as even popcorn enemies take multiple hits to kill. It's also difficult to land shots in this game as the weapons you use have erratic patterns and the enemies move around quite a lot. You'll mostly be focusing on your ship due to the sheer number of bullets on the screen, so it can be problematic keeping sustained damage on the enemy. Looking over to the right of the screen to see if you're hitting anything will often cause you to collide with a bullet. Being a euroshmup, as it is, this game gives you a pretty healthy life bar and plenty of healing items. So getting hit several times isn't a run ender.
The scoring system is ripped out of Sonic the Hedgehog's playbook. Enemies, when defeated, will drop golden rings. You pick these up to get points and to keep a chain counter going in the bottom right of the screen. When you fill up this chain counter, it releases a powerup, healing item, point bonus, etc., and adds to your multiplier. You need to keep an eye on this chain counter (which can often lead you to taking damage) and keep it going because you're going to need those extra powerups that it provides. They really should have put this chain counter towards the left of the screen... you know, near your ship so you can actually keep your eyes where they need to be. On paper, this scoring system is pretty good. But in practice, it can be a bit cumbersome. The game scrolls so slowly that the majority of the rings, powerups, score multipliers, etc. tend to just hang out over on the right side of the screen. Constantly you'll be forced to charge in to grab these items only to have enemies spawn behind you or blast you from off screen. It's extremely frustrating and not very fun. A lot of the focus of this game is about being patient and assessing the risk of when you need to dash in to grab that powerup you need or to snag that ring to keep your mulitplier going. They could have tweaked this a bit because it just doesn't feel good or natural and tends to break the flow of the game rather than sustain it.
Speaking of not fun, the bosses in this game are a total grind. They are often pretty large and take up most of the screen. But their styling is pretty generic and is usually something like a giant head and arm. They all have a weak spot that are the only way to damage them. As I mentioned earlier, it can be difficult to land a shot on the enemy; and this is no exception. Most of the weak spots have a shroud, or a wall, or some alternate form that completely prevents you from being able to deal any damage to the boss whatsoever. These phases go on for way too long. All the while, the person talking to you on the coms keeps saying, "they can't be hurt in this phase." Yeah, obviously. You've told me like 50 times. Not only that, but when you do land a shot on the bosses, they are huge bullet sponges and take minutes to bring down. Considering that these boring marathon boss fights are the big payoff for slow, boring, and plodding levels... fatigue will set in rather quickly. Couple this with the trance music that's highly repetitive and often low energy this game will almost put you to sleep. In addition to this, not only are the stages overly long and tedious, there's 10 of them. This is way too many and causes a full playthrough of the game to be 60-90 minutes long. I find that the sweet spot for a shmup is around 30 minutes, so this length of game is just excessive. It makes the game feel more like it's padded out rather than full of content. Not only that, at first you won't even be able to play through all 10 stages. Instead, you have to play through the earlier stages time and time again to locate and collect hidden keys to unlock the later stages. Ouch. Only after this will you be able to finish the game. This is a terrible system and no game should lock its main content behind optional items like this.
But we're still not done... Outside of the main game are 30 challenges. You have to complete these to unlock new weapons and the final ship. These challenges range from killing a certain number of enemies in a time period, to completing several stages on one life, to not getting hit in a tough part of the level. They are all very draconian and not really fun at all. Many of them I attempted again and again without making progress. Perhaps if they had been cumulative challenges (like kill 10,000 enemies over all your playthroughs) I would have been more interested in completing them. Or, maybe if the game was just...more fun.
As it is, Soldner-X2: Final prototype is just a very slow and generic euroshmup. It looks pretty good and plays well, but the action just isn't there. The excessive length of the game and its levels combined with the grinding for everything make the whole experience a drag. Boss battles that take 5 minutes to finish even when you know all of the patterns and are dodging every shot aren't good game design. This is especially true considering you've already picked up like 75 powerups at this point... The reviews I've seen online for this game seem to be pretty good. However, they all mention how refreshing it is to play such and old-school style game in a sea of heart pumping first person shooters. This is a dead giveaway that these people aren't very familiar with shmups nor arcade games in general... Then, it dawned on me. That's who this game is for! It's for people who aren't very familiar with shmups nor arcade games. So, I guess that's who I'd recommend it to. Anyone else who IS experienced with those sorts of games, or has a respect for their own time, should stay away from this one. It's more boring and generic than bad. This one could definitely be 1 credit cleared, but I'm not sure why you'd ever want to even try that.
Final Status: Beaten
Final Score: 5/10 (Mediocre)
