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Isagoras Review

Isagoras is a “Vertical” shoot ’em up, the reason I quote the Vertical part as the game actually has gameplay that changes angles so its like the whole screen has rotated to the left or right which is something that is rather refreshing to see. The plot is the human race has colonized the solar system but is still incapable of intergalactic travel, the government is having problems with a separatist movement and in the midst of this the earth is attacked by an unknown alien attacker.

The title and menu screens are somewhat cool, a noir abstract style with bubbles floating up in the background that looks quite modern and polished with an almost archetypal music, it works quite well. The main menu includes a continue option which is a bit deceptive since it is only used to continue the game if you pause, you get no continues if you lose all your lives. This to me is a bad design choice, you should get unlimited lives or continues in this day and age, you should only have to restart the stage from the start not the entire game. You get the choice between easy and hard mode, hard mode provides less lives and more enemies, you also seem to move slightly faster. Finally, there is an option between using the controller with one or two hands that maps the controller accordingly.

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Gameplay is generally what you expect; you get waves of enemies appearing on the screen from all directions and fire out in either specific directions, patterns or with homing attacks. At the end of the stage you get a large boss. Unlike a lot of vertical shooters, the screen is not limited to small section of the screen like it was designed for an old arcade vertical monitor, but rather expands to the entire width of the screen. Your ship fires two bullets out the front which do not change, there are also two power ups which you get to use up to use three times per life (with no apparent way to replenish), one slows down time for a short period, the other sends out a super laser beam to cause more damage and the third to stop enemy bullets in their tracks.

The movement feels a little sluggish, you can’t move from one side of the screen to the other very fast which makes it quite annoying if there’s enemies coming down at each side of the screen as there’s only time to get one set of enemies and ones ability to dodge is impaired. When some enemies appear on another ‘layer’, it’s hard to tell at times what ship is where. If the ships in the fore ground looked more faded or something it would be fine. Some enemies (though I’ve only really noticed it with the spheres) move up to your layer, if they are in the upper half of the screen it can be a little hard to hit them properly.

I quite liked the dialogue sequences in game and the character portraits beside them, but I found the text a little too small for the dialogue and it goes away a too fast before you get a chance to read it. Another thing I like is the loading screen before a stage, you get the next part of the story and once it’s loaded it gives you the option of continuing instead of just going straight into the level. It is something I think so many games could benefit from when they provide extra content on the loading screens.

The music is rather good, each stage has a different main theme and the bosses have their own theme. The SFX is a little bland and gets repetitive after a while, a couple of variations of explosions and such would have been nice. The sound of the bullet hitting an enemy ship for example, sounds a bit too much like a sword hitting off armour. Graphically all the 2D graphics are pretty good, the 3D Graphics are good in some places such as cut scenes and a little bland in others such as in game. Some of the ships look decent, while others are a less impressive  and would look better slightly further from the camera so that you cant see their polygons such as the first boss. Almost all the ships are shades of grey which is a little boring and hard to tell the difference between your own allies that sometimes fly past in the background, there are also some questionable design choices such as black ships on a black background such as level four.

I think the game would be quite decent if they fixed the sluggish controls, lack of continues and differentiated more between different objects. It introduces some new elements to an ageing genre, though all in all I’m not sure myself if I’d fork out the 240 :MSPoints: for it. While the aforementioned annoyances are there, I recommend you download the trial and give it a try for yourselves.

You can find more information as well as the trial and full version of the game on the Marketplace.

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