Dariusburst: Another Chronicle EX+ - PS4 Review

Dariusburst: Another Chronicle EX+ by developer and publisher Taito Corporation—Sony PlayStation 4 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

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While the Dariusburst titles have never been among the best-known shoot-‘em-up games out there, the series has been a consistently excellent one throughout the years. Dariusburst: Another Chronicle EX+ continues that trend and fans of the genre should absolutely take the time to check this release out.

For those unfamiliar with this title, it is actually a port of an arcade game just over a decade old. The genre hasn’t seen a ton of innovation during that time, but you can still make sure that the gameplay is balanced and exciting, and Dariusburst: Another Chronicle EX+ delivers on that front.

The first thing that stands out when you play this game is the super widescreen presentation. You have some cropping at the top and bottom, giving this title a very unique perspective. But given the vibrancy of the colors and fluidity of the animations, these elements all come together to create an appealing visual style. The sound effects are standard shmup stuff – gunfire, explosions and so on. Nothing all that memorable, but the soundtrack pulses and thumps with a life of its own that compliments the constant pressure of gameplay.

As for the core gameplay, you have a core horizontal shot that can be charged up to deal a bigger, stronger shot and the ability to tweak the mechanics with angle adjustments and additional power-ups as you battle waves of enemies while navigating the environments. The F-Burst is probably the most interesting mechanic, as it allows you to set up a secondary turret that will fire along with you. You can use this to double up your firepower or deal with enemies in one spot while your ship directly handles them in another. It’s a fun, strategic little element. Boss fights are large, challenging and visually impressive. Stage design is often clever, frequently giving you a couple of different options or so to navigate through the environments, especially in some of the later, more complicated stages.

Dariusburst: Another Chronicle EX+ is not often a long game. You have infinite lives and you can complete a basic session if you have the patience, but there is plenty of replay value to be had here as well. Original Mode gives you a trio of different paths with branching stages that can increase the difficulty and keeping the flow of the game fresh by letting you mix up your preferred path. Original EX is basically the same thing, but with more variety, shuffled up bosses and basically a higher degree of difficulty. There is an Event Mode which feels like a remixed version of the above modes and a couple of limited time events / stages. These are all solid and provide a reason to come back and play things again, but hands-down my favorite of the options is Chronical Mode. It sees you zipping around the universe on a bunch of remixed missions and boss rushes that provides the most content overall.

So that is a lot of content mentioned above – it’s just not necessarily a ton of variety. There is, after a half dozen or so hours, a sort of ‘sameyness’ to the gameplay once you’ve fought the various bosses and flown the different stages, even if the order they get thrown at you gets shuffled up. Also, the bosses can be something of a mixed bag in how they are handled. I mentioned the things I liked about them – variety and visuals – but they can feel like massive damage sponges. Oftentimes your shots just sort of strike the surface and don’t give you any real feedback as to whether or not you’re hitting them in the right spot (unlike many shmups where the boss gives off a distinctive sound, flashes, etc to indicate that you’re hitting them where it hurts). It’s a minor quibble, but with runs generally not lasting for every long (the focus is on many runs, not long runs), and an uneven amount of that time feels like it’s spent just plinking away at the bosses.

Summary

Dariusburst: Another Chronicle EX+ looks and sounds pretty great, with lots of content – even if perhaps the variety of that content could have been better. It is still an enjoyable overall shoot-‘em-up that series and genre fans will want to give a go. This may be a port of a game from over a decade ago, but it agreed rather well.

Score: 7 / 10

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Space Invaders Forever - PS4 Review

 

Space Invaders Forever by developer Taito Corporation and publisher ININ Games—Sony PlayStation 4 Review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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Space Invaders Forever is less a game and more a handful of remixes of the original great. With a trio of different takes on the familiar formula, Space Invaders Forever may not be the deepest video game title out there – but it is a good deal of fun.

By now if you’re unfamiliar with the premise of Space Invaders, I can only assume you’ve spent the last several decades under one of those barricades from the game and I’d like to welcome you to the world of electronics. But seriously, the core gameplay has always been an addicting one that has seen so many variations over the years (I even played a very blatant rip-off called TI Invaders on my Texas Instruments 99/4a nearly four decades ago). Rows of cranky aliens line the top of your screen, randomly dropping bullets / bombs down on your lonely tank that can only dodge or hide under barriers for coverage, while trying to shoot back up at them to eliminate them. They continually creep down the screen towards you, making it easier to hit them but also harder to avoid getting hit. The tension continues to ramp up until you run out of lives, with several small wrinkles being introduced as you progress.

You don’t ‘win’, you survive and build the best score up that you can along the way.

Space Invaders Forever brings us three different variants of this classic formula. The first is Space Invaders Extreme, which had been released on other platforms in the past. Updated visuals and sound make for considerably less repetition in the audio and flashier graphics right out of the gate. But there’s more to it than the classic gameplay. Over sixteen stages you wind up with much more variety in enemy attack patterns, weapons and leaderboards to encourage you to figure out how to best boost that score. That same ‘one more game’ addictive gameplay that helped Space Invaders become such a classic is still alive and well here, with getting the best score possible still the primary motivator. If you want games with true endings and don’t find high scores a good reason to play a game, then likely none of these titles is going to hold your interest. However, if using different kinds of weapons and learning the nuances of how to get big scores is your thing? This mode should give you plenty to do.

Space Invaders Gigamax 4SE is a somewhat convoluted title, but the core gameplay is actually a very cool twist on the classic gameplay. Instead of being a solo effort, here you can work with up to three other players to try and wipe out the invaders before time runs out. This adds another layer of tension to the core gameplay. The idea is that you get a huge swath of invaders to take out – basically I don’t think you can win this solo – if you don’t play with others, I don’t imagine you can get very far. I think that’s alright, but for those who don’t really dig multiplayer, this mode probably won’t have much to offer. Perhaps there should have been an AI mode that could assist for those who want to play but tend to shy away from multiplayer? Still, the bosses are generally cool and the

Last but certainly not least? Arkanoid vs. Space Invaders. It’s such a cool mashup of two classic video games, as I adored Arkanoid when I was a kid. This is the most bazar mode, but also my favorite of the three. It makes clever use of the touchpad to slide your paddle at the bottom back and forth to knock shots up at the invaders in a brickbreaker style of play that actually works really well. It probably helps that both games had pretty similar structure in their gameplay, but still the merging of these two games is pretty brilliant. It also feels like the devs had a bit of extra fun here with it as you can see some other Taito properties show up here as unlockables (for example from Bubble Bobble, the latest of which I recently had a chance to review here as well).

There’s a pretty meaty mode here, with lots of creative levels to work through. There is one small quibble with this mode, and that it’s a port of the mobile game, so the vertical orientation of playing on a phone versus on a widescreen television means there’s a good deal of unused space on either side of the main / rather narrow play area. Hardly a big deal as there’s been many ports of older games that leave some sort of bar / background on the sides to fill space, it just seems more pronounced here.

Summary

Space Invaders Forever is a cool collection of games based on the classic alien blasting classic. They all serve a slightly different function from single player, to multiplayer to an almost puzzle-y mashup with Arkanoid. None of these titles has a ton of depth to them, but at the same time they all manage to scratch that addictive arcade shooter itch that Space Invaders is so well known for.

Score: 7.5 / 10

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Bubble Bobble 4 Friends: The Baron is Back - PS4 Review

Bubble Bobble 4 Friends: The Baron is Back by developer ININ Games and publisher Taito Corporation—Sony PlayStation 4 review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Bubble Bobble 4 Friends: The Baron is Back may be a bit of a mouthful, but it’s also a game full of exciting, bubbly dino action. If you are familiar with the previously released Switch game Bubble Bobble 4 Friends, you pretty much know what to expect here – but with more of it. That game was fun, but this expanded iteration provides even more content and another game mode.

Now, I have a bit of history with this series that gives me something of a soft spot for it right out of the gates. I remember the arcade cabinet from the 80’s and it was one of my very first NES games after getting the console for Christmas from my uncle (Editor's Note (PY): I'm not as old to know there was an arcade but I've got seriously fond memories of the NES version growing up). There’s some good memories baked into this series, which I have poked at now and again over the years.

For those unfamiliar with Bub and Bob’s antics, well… don’t expect any great prose here. Bonner is the bad guy and he needs to be dealt with. It doesn’t really get more involved than that. However, the value in this series has always been in its simple yet ridiculously addictive formula. Each stage is a single screen that doesn’t scroll anywhere, and it kind of meshes platforming, action and some light strategic / puzzle solving elements together for its core gameplay.

You clear a stage by blowing bubbles at your enemies to trap them within. Your bubbles also serve as makeshift platforms that can help you reach areas otherwise not accessible. Where Bubble Bobble 4 Friends managed to shake up for formula a bit is in the introduction of skills, which are attained through beating the bosses. In the original version of the game, you had fifty levels, but Bubble Bobble 4 Friends: The Baron is Back gives us 100 now to work through, effectively doubling the content. It feels like a much more appropriate length, as admittedly I just like the party was over too quickly with the first iteration, but this time the length just seemed about right. It didn’t end too soon, and Bubble Bobble 4 Friends: The Baron is Back didn’t overstay its welcome.

The earlier games in the series focused on Bub and Bob, giving it a glorious co-op mode that made for some frenzied, often hilarious action. Bubble Bobble 4 Friends upped the stakes by providing 4 player co-op, and it makes things even zanier now. There are admittedly times when all that chaos can make things a bit hard to keep track of, but I’d be lying if I said we weren’t laughing a lot more often than we were getting annoyed. My three kids and I had a great time with it. You can certainly play the game in single-player, and Bubble Bobble 4 Friends: The Baron is Back is still a good deal of fun, but it loses the element of unpredictability that makes the co-op such a hoot. That being said, it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity is that this is all couch co-op. Great for me – I have a family of five. Less than ideal for people who maybe don’t have in-house partners to rely on, especially in this day and age where socially gathering is less common.

Aside from the fifty new levels, there is a new mode that reflects the title called The Baron is Back. This essentially adds another fifty levels of gameplay as you are tasked with ascending a tower. The level design is notably different, with tighter spaces that made the experience far more challenging for me than the core mode. I did not struggle much with the core one hundred levels, but The Baron is Back kicked my tail more than a few times and definitely made me reconsider how I was approaching the gameplay.

In terms of presentation, the Bubble Bobble series has always been pretty undemanding of the hardware, but with a cute, colorful style that makes it very family friendly. There’s not much to the character models, but they look fine in their animations and the vibrant stages tend to be very appealing. The music has a peppiness to it that matches the visuals and overall tempo of the game rather nicely as well. It’s clear that the developers had a good time with the stage designs, some of which are just creative, colorful backgrounds while others are very specifically themed.

Summary

Bubble Bobble 4 Friends: The Baron is Back is a great addition to a classic arcade style game that challenges your thinking and your reflexes at the same time. It has that bite-sized, addictive “one more stage” quality with a sizeable amount of content to boot. It certainly works better as a multiplayer game than a single and can provide lots of chaotic good times with the right group playing it. The core concept is relatively simple, but it is a challenge to master.

Score: 8 / 10

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The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors - PS4 Review

It is hard to deny that The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors is a fantastic callback to older quarter devouring arcade machines of yesteryear. With everything from cyber ninjas to a pulsing, heavy soundtrack to a dystopian future, this title oozes 80's charm and fun, fast, but challenging gameplay as well.

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