Wii60 Impressions: Project Sylpheed
When one thinks of Square Enix, you usually think of Japanese style Role-Playing Games. You also think of anything but a pretty game being released on the Xbox 360 for $39.99, but surprisingly enough that’s what Project Sylpheed is going to be priced at when it comes out in America. Even so, is the game going to be worth your time?
One thing to note is that the default control is not an inverted Y-axis. To those that don’t know what an inverted Y-axis is, it means when you press up, the ship goes down, and when you press down, the ship goes up. The tutorial does not include any controls that allow you to fix this, so throughout the whole tutorial I was forced to get used to this. In the actual game and menu, though, you can change this in the options. Unfortunately, by the time I did and got in the real game, I was used to the default scheme and I got all screwed up.
The game’s controls are set up a bit odd, but you’ll get used to it. The accelerate and deccelerate buttons are on the L and R triggers, and the weapon firing buttons are mapped to the L and R bumpers. Anyone that plays shooting games are probably freaking out by now, as that seems incredibly counter-intuitive. I can assure you, you’ll be screwing up at the start between shooting and accelerating. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen all that often.
The D-Pad has two functions. Pressing the down button gives you an extra radar to observe, placing it either in the corner or most of the screen for you to get a better view of where enemies are. This is in addition to a very small radar that is always up in the bottom of the screen. The up button on the D-Pad begins with commands to the other fighters, where you first select how many of them, then what command. The Formation command brings them to you, but they stop fighting. Break Away sends them wherever they want to just fight. Support sends them after any fighter that targets you. Attack sends them after the enemy you are locked onto.
You are able to perform more complex flying manuevers by holding the B button. Hold it down while pressing up or down and you’ll rotate 180 degrees in that direction. Hold it and press left or right and you’ll perform a barrel roll that direction. Pressing A and B at the same time brings your view to the enemy you are currently locked onto. This can be very useful in the hectic combat that occurs.
The most useful manuever, however, is pressing down the right thumb stick. This merely causes the camera to focus on your enemy target at all times, which isn’t too bad. However, the ship continues in its own direction, so manuevering it around to aim at your target is awkward, difficult, and makes it easy to collide into things.
The mission available in the demo is basically an escort mission. You have to survive and shoot down as many of the enemy as you can while the convoy ship passes through the enemy defense grid to safety. The actual combat isn’t too difficult. You’ll see that enemies have locked onto you often, as well as missile warnings. However, for as many times as you take damage, your shields often recharge. Once your shields are gone, though, your armor starts to take hits. Your shields can also take so much before they are down for good. When your ammo, armor and/or shields are too low, you find that convoy ship to resupply. Generally you just fly near it until the resupply notification appears on your HUD, then you hit the back button. After that it sends you back into the fray, which unfortunately can have you sometimes flying right into the ship. Collision is no fun and takes out a lot of your armor.
I never managed to complete the demo for three reasons. The first is death by collision. That was my bad. The second is the convoy was completely destroyed. In this process I learned how valuable the radio logs can be, as while you’re focusing on shooting down enemies, people are chatting it up on the radio. A lot of times you’ll just hear people asking why you shot them, which a friendly fire warning will pop up when you do. The simple answer is “you flew into my rain of bullets and laser fire”. Yeah, sometimes the friendlies really aren’t all that intelligent.
Due to the radio logs I came under the theory that I had to shoot the larger enemy vessels down. Unfortunately, this was a rather short attempt as their lasers did so much damage my shields instantly wiped out and it took no time for them to destroy my armor.
It’s important to note that the demo was pretty fun to play. I’ll probably give it a few more tries before giving up on it. I have a strong feeling I didn’t try all the manuevers and strategies I could have. However, the fact that they are using such a hard to complete mission for the demo isn’t exactly pleasing. Either this is an early mission, which shows that the rest of the game is going to be incredibly hard, or this is a later mission that requires you to use more advanced skills. I recommend giving it a try, and when the game comes out a rental to see if it’s up your alley. That or keep an eye out for a review here at Wii60.
Lastly, the opening cut scene seems like this game is going to have quite the storyline. However, if you’re not into sci-fi space anime, it probably won’t be your cup of tea. If you are, then have fun. I watched maybe two or three of those kinds of anime before I realized they were all the same.
- Chris (Grohdinger)
