Ignore the shining 'Super-Fx'-sticker and just leave it alone!
After the enormous success of Star Fox, other games wanted to make use of the Super Fx micro-chip. The advantage of a Super Fx-chip was not only that it created 3D images, but it also helped selling the game.
If you had to choose between two games, you would pick the one with the FX chip, just because it had some 'revolutionary' technology in it. It was like the snes-advertisements all saying that the Super Nintendo was 16-bit, and this made people buy the console although nobody knew what a 'bit' was.
This marketing-strategy sounded very attractive, so Electrobrain and Sony decided to make a game using the chip: Vortex. Without knowing what the game was, I bought it and I'm now going to explain why I don't like it.
The story is ok. Nothing too special but, eh, Super Mario World has a simple story and it's still a good game. You are a Battle Morphing system and your 'Core-segments' have been stolen. It's your job to retrieve them all, bring them to the resting place and so cross the evil plans of the Aki-Do warlords!
You are a kind of Transformer, you can morph into different battle systems.
The main battle system is the Walker. As the name suggests it walks. It can also shoot rockets and lasers and jump.
The second battle system is the Land Burner, it's a fast system and can shoot the same lasers as the walker.
The next battle system is the sonic jet. It can fly so you can now reach areas that you couldn't reach at first. It's the fastest system, it can shoot lasers and you can do a speed boost for a short time.
The last system is the Hard Shell and it's the slowest system. It can only go backward and forward. So don't use for long movement, but it comes in handy during boss fights as it has a strong bombing attack and it has a high defense.
The point of these different battle systems is that you must really think about when to use what system.
At the beginning of the game you can choose to do 3 trainings-missions or just the game. The trainings-missions introduce you to the controls and the way the game works. The main game has 7 levels.
The controls are not good. Everything has a delay of a second. The moving mechanics are ok for the land burner, the sonic jet and the hard shell the but really bad for the walker. Because with the walker you can only move in 16 directions and this makes the game reeaally stiff.
The shooting works fine because it auto-focuses on the enemy, just like in Metroid Prime.
The music is great. It sounds like house-music with all the beeps beats and it totally suits the 'space'-atmosphere.
The graphics are ok. It's 3D and it makes the game very nice to look at! Also no level looks like the previous one, and I liked how the last level had all this sunlight coming through the clouds.
But I think that the enemies look virtually the same (again) as the ones from starfox and that's just a shame. There was obviously no imagination used creating the bad guys.
There are parts when you go into first-person perspective. In these occasions you don't know what you're doing and you just keep flying into walls and obstacles.
Another graphics-caused flaw is that obstacles appear out of nowhere and so the first second you will think that there is no obstacles in which you can clash and the next second you die because you hit an obstacle. It also makes the environment boring because most of the time you just see a plain field with nothing on it.
Those flaws combined with the slow controls make the game really unenjoyable. You never know what you're doing because you don't see anything, and when you do, you're too late because the controls don't let you react. It doesn't make the game any fun and way to hard! You could lower the difficulty, but that doesn't matter because it will only reduce the amount of enemies and you'll still walk into obstacles!
Another thing that bothers me is that there are times when there are almost no enemies and you're just flying to you goal. When you encounter an enemy it dies within 3 shots. It's just plain boring! Then all of a sudden you have to fight a boss and he is so hard that you die and have to do the whole stage all over again!
So really, when you see this game, don't get obsessed by its 'Super FX-sticker' on the box but just leave it on the shelves and go play StarFox!
Gameplay: 3/10 – It is boring, slow, hard (due to graphics and controls) and stiff.
Controls: 5/10 – Delayed and for the walker there are only 16 directions to go to. The rest is fine.
Graphics: 5/10 – Yes, it does look nice and it is in 3D, but the graphics appear too late and there are times when you don't know what you're doing.
Music: 8/10 – Perfectly suits the atmosphere of the game.
Overal: 4/10 – The gameplay is so bad that it just doesn't make the game worth buying…
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