‘Syder Arcade’ Review – Uridium? Barely Know ‘Em!
I’m always keen to rise to a challenge (ooerr, missus), and Syder Arcade makes it’s intent clear right on the official site by throwing down the gauntlet. ‘Ultra-challenging campaign levels’, ‘Difficulty levels from easy to impossible!’ and ‘Prepare to smash your keyboard!’. Well, I can’t say no to that, can I? Not as a veteran of Super Meat Boy, DoDonPachi and many more.
Ouch. Okay, well, maybe if I just lower the difficulty? Okay, still painful. Perhaps I underestimated this game (or overestimated my own skill). Horrible headlong crash into a brick wall of pain aside (the second impression), Syder Arcade makes a damn fine first impression. They really get a lot of use out of the Unity engine here, providing detailed 3D graphics with plenty of post-processing and particle effects. Controls well too – simple (four movement keys, two fire buttons) but precise. Tight and accurate, which is always good for a shmup. This is clearly a well engineered game.
As well engineered as the gameplay is, and as impressive as the visuals are, there’s perhaps a little missing on the ‘soul’ front here. Enemy and friendly ships just feel vaguely generic in their design, especially the alien enemies. Still, they animate well and the weapon effects are sufficiently punchy. Great music as well – attempting to imitate the best of the Amiga chiptune/tracker era, and doing it in style. The developers even go and offer a series of low-fi visual filters for laughs and nostalgia. Ever wanted to see what 4-color CGA graphics would look like, hardware-accelerated and widescreen? It’s a nice touch.
But back to the heart of the gameplay, though – what makes Syder Arcade so uncompromisingly hard? Well, the campaign levels are long for starters – only six of them, but most around the ~10 minute mark. Doesn’t sound like much, but for a shmup, it’s massive. You can freely move in all directions through the lengthy levels, and enemy waves will spawn in intermittently ala Uridium or Defender. There’s a button to flip the facing of your ship, and continuing in a direction for a couple of seconds will give you a further speed boost for faster navigation. The issue is that there’s so many waves per level, and enemy bosses have health bars that feel like they take forever to chip their way through. But that wouldn’t be so bad, were it not for two key issues: Powerups are essential and randomly handed out, and you only have one life.
That ship might be huge, but it's on your side, so it's worryingly fragile.
The one-life aspect is what really hurts the game. When levels are so long a single mistake can be a pain. Die, and it’s all the way back to the beginning again, skipping through the mission opening dialogue once more, and hoping that you roll a few sixes and get useful powerups instead of tiny random point pickups. You might have a health bar in this game, but there’s no grace period when you’re damaged, your hitbox encompasses the whole ship and bullets tend to move in clusters, meaning that a single slip can take almost all your health or just outright kill you. Even the most brutal of arcade shmups give you a stock of extra lives, and nowadays tend to automatically consume smartbombs instead of killing you straight away. Not so, here.
Other elements compound the difficulty further. Even the smallest ‘popcorn’ enemies take several hits to kill, and enemies only slightly larger take about ten times more damage than you can soak up in return. Oh, and the second level in the campaign? An escort mission. Unless you’re absolutely manic in your covering of the cruiser slowly trudging it’s way through the level, it can die in just a couple collisions as well. Again, back to the start, only this time after a lengthy failure animation. It’s not just hard – it’s frustrating. There’s no option to just plough through the game with continues and sacrifice high score like in a real arcade game, and death costs a lot of time.
Syder Arcade claims to take it’s inspiration from modern bullet hell shooters, Amiga classics such as Uridium and even a dash of Defender, but aside from presentation (which it does excellently) it fails to learn the right lessons from it’s inspirations, and makes up for a potential lack of difficulty by making the player slowly backpedal to pile more shots into enemies and rely on random powerup drops that can either be lifesaving (the repair powerup restores full health) or completely useless (100 points).
The most frustrating thing about it all is that with just a few small tweaks, it could all be better. A consistent powerup reward system, maybe a few extra lives here, faster-moving but weaker enemies. But sadly, I crashed headlong into this game and bounced off – there’s just too many balance issues here for me to really dig in, even on the lower difficulty settings. A shame, because Studio Evil clearly have quite a lot of talent and a flair for the impressive, at least in terms of audiovisuals.
Addendum (May 25th): In the writing of this review, a couple of errors slipped through the net – apologies! To clarify, there are lives – technically – but dying bumps you back to the start of the current level, making their only real purpose in keeping a high score going through the campaign, as there are no mid-mission checkpoints that I’ve seen. There are also a trio of playable ships, each with a unique main gun and smartbomb as well as different health/speed ratings. Still, the speed even on the slowest/heaviest becomes relatively unimportant if you pick up a few speed powerups, but that requires lucking out to a degree.
Powerups are apparently only semi-random and will ensure you get at least the basics over time, but there’s still a solid chance of it dropping vital health powerups when you’re already unharmed, or useless points when you’re one hit away from restarting the level. I’ve also been informed that play balance may have been tweaked somewhat since I first played it – I’ll have to poke around for a newer review build and see if things are any different, but until that can be confirmed, my general comments on the game stand. Still, there’s a playable demo available from the official site – as always, it’s best to make up your own mind, so give it a try.
