Features

Zero Signal · #1

I am returning Ikaruga today, after owning it for 2 days. I was really excited to get it. I had heard from other that it was really cool with awesome graphics, while also being really difficult. It looked very nice for being a port from Dreamcast to Gamecube.

Well, after playing it for many hours yesterday (as well as many deaths; the game is SO impossible even on easy that I had to use my Action Replay to beat the game just to get it over with), I concluded that Ikaruga in no way lives up to the hype.

WEAPONS
I was VERY disappointed with the weapons. One thing that I look forward to in these kinds of shooters are the insane weapons that tend to be evident in them. No such thing in Ikaruga. Just basic shooting at polarity changing from black to white. Now, I will admit that the polarity shifting is a really cool idea, but it cannot save the weapons in the game. You have the same weapons throughout the entire game.

The only other weapon is the energy missle barrage that you can power up by absorbing same polarity enemy fire into your charge-up.

GRAPHICS
People raved about the graphics as being so magnificent; a paragon of what a shooter should look like. Through playing the game, the graphics were indeed nice, but nothing as fantastic as the hype suggested. There were also the slowdowns whenever a large boss exploded. Given the hardware that it is running on now, I can only attribute this to poor programming and a sloppy port from the Dreamcast.

One somewhat annoying aspect of the game is that it does not take full advantage of television screen area. The game painfully looks like it was just a port from an arcade-style vertical screen. It is somewhat cool that you can change the screen to act like that vertical screen (by making it sideways, essentially), but I have no interest in turning my 230lb 32" Sony Wega XBR HDTV on its side. That is ludicrous.

GAMEPLAY
The gameplay revolves around switching your polarity based on your enemies. White polarity enemies are damaged a lot more when you are black polarity, take less when you are white and you absorb the incoming fire of same polarity enemies; vice versa for black polarity enemies.

Ultimately, however, the gameplay proves boring when you are seeing the same enemies over and over and over again. The variety of enemies I can probably count on one hand throughout the entire game (sans chapter bosses).

Did I mention the dying over and over and over again part? Yes. The game is so impossibly hard even on easy mode that, as I said before, I beat the game with an Action Replay in frustration. Some sequences have you dying literally 5 times in 15 seconds.

The controls in the game are simplistic, so there is really no way to screw that up. However, I think that as a default, the shoulder buttons would have been better for polarity shifting that the A button.

The game is extremely short, as well, but then most shooters like this are like that so there was no surprise there.

SOUND
The sound in the game was good, as it should be, although passable would be a more accurate description. Standard fare for a shooter, although the robotic voice are almost completely impossible to understand. But it is not as if it was saying anything critical to the gameplay. If it was saying, "You fucking loser. This game is too much for you and you will never beat it, but we got your money now suck it down, bitch.", I would not even know it.

CONCLUSION
I had a LOT more fun playing Silpheed on PS2 than I did with Ikaruga. I was simply not happy playing it, and cheated just to beat it and see the rest of the game. I am returning it today to get something else. This game is definitely a rental, although I have enough fun with Silpheed that I still play it every now and then at it is still fun. This could never be the case for Ikaruga, at least for me.