*gagghhurdlepplortchglugthhppt*

Oh, sorry... was seeing how far I could fit the controlling into my mouth... it was more rewarding than playing Project Sylpheed.

Seriously, it's like playing a button-masher... that flies in space.

I really like the art design but if I thought the silly effects of Ninety-Nine Nights were distracting and obnoxious, then Sylpheed takes that to a whole new order of magnitude. Kinda like Carrot Top in its annoyingly excessive but ultimately ridiculous quality. Specifically, the vapor/exhaust trails of fighters are overly bright and colorful, overly long, and don't dissipate very fast... so in a large dogfight it is very easy to lose sight of nearly everything, including your HUD, due to the weave of colored trails obscuring your view. Whether you are in wide 3rd, close 3rd, or 1st perspective, it is never easy to make out what is going on thanks to the very fast pacing and unsoundly tiny size of on-screen text identifying different friendly or enemy units. Enemy fighters are either little dots in the distance that you only recognize thanks to your HUD... or they are fly past you because you were travelling so fast to reach the distant looking red dot that you over-shot their position without realizing how close you were getting until it was too late. The designs themselves, whenever you aren't zooming by so fast as to not be able to appreciate them, are rather nice... from the fighters to the increasingly larger capitol ships. It was rather fun to dive towards a cruiser unleashing anti-ship missles and railgun slugs before pulling up to strafe down the length of the hull or to just dive right through the middle of a frigate, rolling and dodging debris as it breaks up and explodes around me. The background starfields and stellar clouds and such are equalling impressive... when you take the time to look at them.

The sound can be described in much the same way, being of good quality but too often unenjoyable due to being deluged with too much of it at once. It's nice to hear your Wingman chime in to call attention to damage you have taken or for your XO to tell you that you should rearm before your ammo supply dwindles too much further or any of the other radio chatter... but between all of this and the sound effects and the music, it just gets discordant. And I am still tweaking the settings trying to find that balance between their various volumes that I am comfortable with. It just seems like I have to pick one that I want to hear and the rest be damned.

The gameplay is annoying. You have objectives and sub-objectives, the completion of which earns you points that you spend to develop new weapon systems. While your objectives are obvious enough and easily accessible should you forget, I have yet to find out how to know what my sub-objectives are. All of it is mentioned via radio chatter, but sometimes it is hard to figure out just what the hell you are being covertly tasked to do. Whenever you hear, for example, a destroyer commenting about fighters coming right for it... are you supposed to peel-off from your attack run against that battleship to go intercept or is it just background environment? It would at least be nice to see what you missed after the mission so you could retry. Maybe it's buried somewhere, since I can't say that I have looked too hard... maybe in that Briefings option that I never look at because it has yet to be helpful...

The controls grow on you, but are definately atrocious. Press this, double-tap that, hold this in... so many variants on every button. And some of your capabilities are a waste. I have to get any benefit out of the Y button, for example.

I kept Bioshock for a month or so before sending it back, but I bet that Gamefly gets Project Slypheed back by the end of the week.