Soldner-X: Himmelssturmer Review

      Crazy German name, check. Story that can justify you fighting any kind of mechanical or biological enemy, check. One vs. thousands theming, check. Pre-flight checklist complete, must be a shoot-em-up!

      Starting up Soldner-X, I could immediately tell it was made by Eastasiasoft and Sidequest studios, the same people that made Rainbow Moon. It shares some assets with that game, including a few fonts. The style is also similar, with many of the enemies having a very sprite-like appearance despite not actually being sprites (or maybe they are HD sprites, I dunno). I think it is because they have some small bits of animation to them that loops, much like a classic sprite. Soldner also features multiple pop-up tutorials to teach you it's many systems, just like Rainbow Moon. And by that I mean that they are the exact same boxes.

     Soldner is one of the hardest 2d space-ship shooters I've ever played, and I feel like I am pretty good at them. I can hold my own in Ikaruga, Philosoma, R-Type, and quite a few others. Soldner has been carefully designed to put it on par with games like that as far as difficulty goes. I started playing on normal mode. After about 5 attempts, I pushed the difficulty down to easy. Then I went down to very easy. Even with earning a few extra continues along the way, I think it took me a few tries to beat the game on very easy, which is where I recommend everyone should start. Then I went back to easy and was able to beat that in a few tries. I never beat normal mode. This all took 27 tries and over 20 hours (estimated).

     Soldner sets itself apart from your typical shooter mechanics with a few neat systems and ideas. One of the most noticeable is the chain system. Killing enemies with the same weapon builds up a chain meter. Once full, you gain a chain level if you switch to another weapon. Completeing multiple chains in a row releases power-ups. You need power-ups bad, so following this chain system is really important to keeping a good flow of power-ups coming your way. This system is easy to follow even for a beginner because there is a helpful chime that tells you when to switch weapons. This system really gives Soldner a different feel than other shooters, and since there are so many shooters in the world, you need something different to hold your attention. There are a few odd quirks to this system though. If you want to keep using the same weapon and still build your chain meter, you can simply switch to a different weapon when the meter is filled and then switch right back to the first weapon. This is tempered by the fact that your weapons overheat if used too much. It's also weird that when you gain a chain level that will release a power-up, you don't automatically start a new chain, you have to switch weapons to manually release the power-up and get the new chain started. This can mess up the flow a bit if you forget to do it.

      Soldner is also different than other shooters in that it has a lot of different power-ups, including some very clever ones, such as weapon protection, which keeps your weapons powered-up in your next life if you die. This is really important as getting downgraded from throwing out hundreds of bullets to a pea-shooter is frustrating and can lead to a chain of deaths. It's reminiscent of the way you could keep weapons powered up in Philosoma by manipulating what weapon you had equipped when you died. There is also an armor piercing shot power-up that makes you do normal damage to heavily armored enemies that take very little damage from your normal shots, a cool-down power-up that stops your weapons from over-heating, and bad power-ups that give you de-buffs, including a particularly evil one that kills you outright if you pick it up!

Soldner has another great mechanic giving it a unique feel: beserking. When your health gets low, you enter beserk mode. You take half damage and deal out double damage. This makes most deaths very dramatic as you become extremely powerful right before you die. This often allows you to finish off a mini-boss or blast through a difficult section and is a tremendously great idea. It would fit right into almost any video game. I'd love to see the same thing in more games as it is really fun. One more thing, Soldner also shows you how much damage you are doing in the form of RPG style hit point numbers bouncing off enemies as your shots hit them. Genius, I love seeing that in a shooter setting for the first time.

      The Soldner X fighter has 6 weapon systems it can use. You always have the standard rapid-fire shot and the lightning shot, which can hit multiple enemies at once but does less damage. You can also pick up a few more powerful weapons in some levels. Rather than overheating, these weapons have limited ammo. You can get a very-short range flamethrower that does massive damage and a powerful laser shot that arcs in an interesteing firing pattern. You can also hold one traditional bomb, which blows up in a wide radius (but which does not destroy bullets like many bomb weapons do), and up to five rockets. If you equip your rockets, holding down fire causes them to lock onto the enemy on-screen with the most hp. Releasing fire launches the rocket, which then heat-seeks it's way around the screen to the target. If it hits, it does massive bomb-like damage. Some enemies are equipped with these rockets too though....

      The game constantly encourages you to find hidden keys in its levels, promising some kind of cool unlock if you find a majority of them. These are carried by enemies or hiding in destructible objects and out of the way spots. I won't spoil what you unlock, but I'll say that it is very, very worth getting.

      So those are a few of the things that make Soldner X different. Beyond that, it is a very standard horizontally-scrolling shooter. The d-pad is move, X is fire, square is use bomb, and L1 and R1 cycle through your weapons. The enemy design and backgrounds also include a lot of things you have seen in other shooters. Some enemies, especially the more civillian and military looking enemies, look almost exactly like some designs from R-Type and Philosoma to me. There are a few really cool and unique designs among the more standard stuff. A few bosses stand out in particular as being either unique or a nice homage to some famous bosses from other games. The Soldner X fighter that you control is a great design too. The story, which is told by some terribly written mid-level text over nice art pieces, is almost exactly the same are R-Type (an evil force in space is corrupting everything). Surprisingly, the ending to the story is quite good.

Soldner's music is also quite good. It too seems to be homaging some famous shooter music. One amazing track sounds very similar to a track from the game Phalanx (which is hidden on the disc with the PS1 game Zero Divide). And if I remember right, the Phalanx level with that track has you shooting down asteroids just like the Soldner level does.
      My only real complaint is the presence of some cheap deaths when you re-spawn into solid objects. You have a few seconds of intangibility when you re-spawn, but it's still easy to get stuck inside an object and instantly die during some crowded sections. This is really frustrating as you need every life you can get. It's also hard to succeed when you re-spawn without a lot of firepower in a really hard section. This can cause multiple deaths in a row. The game will often drop you some free power-ups if this happens, but not enough to get you back to full strength if you were really powered-up before.

      Soldner looks very much like a standard shooter, but actually playing it gives you a different feel than most games because of all the unique features built into the game. Standard features, such as enemy patterns and boss fights, are also superbly designed. Enemies move in quite dastardly ways to try to get hits on you, and boss fights are slug-fests against dynamic foes with some interesting attacks and patterns. Soldner stays fun whether you are fighting hundreds of tiny ships, dodging mines, taking on a trio of mini-bosses and their entourage, or navigating deadly cave walls or asteroid fields. A lot of tiny tweaks to the standard formula make for a great game, tier 3. Just don't expect to be able to beat it on normal mode without putting in a few dozen hours. It's disturbing to think that there are 3 difficulty levels above normal....