#Strafe metacritic series#

The dungeons have a little bit of exploration to them, as there are keys and locks to work through, but the enemies take a leaf out of Ploids’ book and are utterly random, so you’re mostly just getting out of the way of their chaotic flight-paths rather than fighting them as, again, they don’t drop anything. The top-down bits are bland and without anything approaching landmarks, so you’re left fighting enemies, which is pointless, as they don’t drop anything at all, and moving through screen after screen after screen of green expanse. In theory it’s deeper than the other games in the collection combined, but the sections are all wobbly. Get to the end of these, and you will commonly fight a boss, before emerging into a town to chat with the locals. Once in a dungeon, you’re in the action-platformer bits, where the view goes side-on and there’s more hacking and slashing, as well as some rudimentary platforming and even some bobbing around in water. There are the top-down, traditional Zelda bits where you are moving from screen to screen, hack-and-slashing enemies and looking for a path to somewhere interesting – a town or dungeon perhaps. It’s a game that’s clearly in love with Legend of Zelda II, as it follows its structure line-for-line. This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not the best game with ‘Souls’ in the title. We can only imagine that it’s here to pad out the ‘Collection’, but it’s cheeky and I’m not going to stand for it, I tell you.Īnd so we come, battered and weary, to Reknum Souls Adventure. It’s the same flipping game, but with blood-red backgrounds and different text on defeating a Ploid. Thank heavens for Uchusen 2, which will no doubt improve on the stripped-back bones of Uchusen 1, right? No! Uchusen 2 is worse, simply because it has the audacity of being an exact copy of Uchusen.

You could probably make better levels in Duplo.

#Strafe metacritic series#

They’re just a series of blocks to jump over. None of its individual elements hold up: you have an incredibly limited move-set and no upgrades the enemies don’t actively attack you, they instead move or fire randomly bosses do exactly the same, but they take longer to kill and levels could have been procedurally generated. The main character can jump, shoot and jump AND shoot, but doesn’t stray much further than that, and the aim is to navigate some mid-sized levels before defeating a boss at the end of each of them to grab the hallowed floppy disk.Ĭompared to any other retro run-and-gunner, like Megaman, Metal Slug, Contra or Turrican, Ploid is lightweight to the point of being transparent. There’s a plot about aliens invading and the only way of defeating them is by finding several floppy disks, like an ‘80s pre-boot of Independence Day. Working down the list one-by-one, Ploid is probably the best of the bunch by the thinnest of whiskers.