Journey to Silius
Main game
3.51 average rating based on 57 ratings
- Developers
- Tokyo Design Center
- Publishers
- SUNSOFT, Tokai Engineering
- Platforms
- Family Computer, Nintendo Entertainment System
- Genres
- Adventure, Platform, Shooter
- Themes
- Action, Science fiction
Release Dates
User Stats
How Long Is Journey to Silius?
Related Content
An OK but unimpressive licensed game that isn't licensed after all
This review is for the Nintendo Entertainment System version
(This is the 23rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Did you know? Journey to Silius was originally meant to be a Terminator game. As Sunsoft lost the license mid-development, story and graphics were changed. In more recent news, the game was ported over to Nintendo Switch in 2019 for Switch Online subscribers, in case you're curious.
Journey to Silius is a run & gun video game developed by Sunsoft and released on August 10th, 1990 for the NES. The composor is Naoki Kodaka, and I mention that because he was the composer for a game I reviewed more recently: Batman for the Sega Genesis (I was a big fan of the soundtrack).
Whether the soundtrack is good here too, what the game is even about and whether I liked it I will discuss in more detail below.
STORYTELLING
You play Jay McCray, who is the son of a scientist who was responsible for the development of space colony #428 at a time where emigration to space colonies has become necessary due to overpopulation of the Earth. Jay's father dies during development and leaves …
(This is the 23rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Did you know? Journey to Silius was originally meant to be a Terminator game. As Sunsoft lost the license mid-development, story and graphics were changed. In more recent news, the game was ported over to Nintendo Switch in 2019 for Switch Online subscribers, in case you're curious.
Journey to Silius is a run & gun video game developed by Sunsoft and released on August 10th, 1990 for the NES. The composor is Naoki Kodaka, and I mention that because he was the composer for a game I reviewed more recently: Batman for the Sega Genesis (I was a big fan of the soundtrack).
Whether the soundtrack is good here too, what the game is even about and whether I liked it I will discuss in more detail below.
STORYTELLING
You play Jay McCray, who is the son of a scientist who was responsible for the development of space colony #428 at a time where emigration to space colonies has become necessary due to overpopulation of the Earth. Jay's father dies during development and leaves behind a floppy disk, where he's recorded a message. He says that terrorists are looking to destroy the colony, so Jay sets out to protect the colony and avenge his dad.
This is where the story begins and the storytelling pretty much ends. From here on out, you find yourself on the space colony and kill terrorists / aliens and once you defeat the final boss, a few-second long cutscene plays before the end credits roll. So if you're here for any sort of story, you'll get a setting that is slightly more detailed than usual but nothing beyond that.
GAMEPLAY
This is another pretty average platformer in just about every way. You use a hand gun to start the game and get up to 6 by the end of it, the most unique being the homing missile. There are 5 stages, each side-by-side platforming stages with a boss at the end. That's a formula that has worked very well at that time but it is really simple, not innovative at all and since the game really doesn't have enough features or a fun enough gameplay loop, it grows stale quickly and the reliance on the same formula is not really justified.
The way the levels are designed (I'll crap on that a bit more later) is just so frustrating because it makes it very, very hard to reliably dodge enemy attacks. There are so many of them that just are at spots that you can't reach, which means you will most of the time just tank the damage and move forward.
I also can't say I got much out of the 6 weapons on offer. Once you knew what to do, the hand gun did just fine, but you only knew what to do after suffering through a part multiple times.
In the end, I did beat the game in about 3 hours, and the formula DOES work in that it offers a little bit of fun next to all the frustration. But it would have been a lot less fun without the great soundtrack on offer, as I describe below.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. Sound design ranged from OK to good, with the weapons sounding satisfying enough. The soundtrack is great, similarly to what the composer managed to do for the Batman Sega Genesis game. Banger after banger almost throughout. Unfortunately all boss fights use the same track and I would have definitely enjoyed more variety there, especially since the track that exists loops pretty quickly and isn't the highlight of the OST.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The game looks pretty good. It was actually designed with a space colony in mind (plenty of games didn't always stay true to their setting among the games I've played so far). The game makes good use of colors, the enemy design is mostly solid (apart from the bosses) and especially the outside stages allow for some great, detailed background work. Unfortunately, some of the boss fights simply took place with a simple black background, whilst the final one for example showed distant planets, stars and space stations. Not sure why they did that.
ATMOSPHERE
The game does a good job here. The way the levels are designed artistically suit the theme.
CONTENT
The game is on the shorter side - it took me roughly 3 hours to beat it - and there isn't much to it. All levels are pretty much: move side to side, choose one of 6 weapons to fire and do some (not so great) platforming until you get to the boss. No other content to mix it up, no power up items or the like and no real story progression. What does exist is fine but this is a fairly skippable game as far as the history of video games is concerned.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
It's a pretty simple concept as far as the level design goes. A level starts and you have to go through a bunch of enemies, do some platforming and hope you don't die to gravity and then fight a boss. You do that a few times and then you beat the game, but the game is purposely frustrating to make it harder to beat within a rental time, which hopefully leads to the player (or their parents) to buy a copy outright.
The game doesn't shy away from this formula and there just aren't enough features here to justify it being so stale. Also, one of my biggest minor complaints, is that the game requires you to jump down a lot without being able to see what's there. And what's there usually is an enemy, so I very often either would step on them and take damage, or they would shoot a millisecond after I landed and I would take damage from that. It's just bad.
In its whole, level design isn't necessarily bad, it's just bland.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
There isn't really anything that I can think of that this game did that you didn't see before. Science fiction as a theme for a platformer, based on my experiences so far, were on the rarer side at the time, so there is that. Plus the soundtrack is definitely well above average and if you check the game's wikipedia page, you can read a bit about how the composer did some different stuff there, but other than that, this is a pretty forgettable game.
REPLAYABILITY
The game doesn't even have a high score system as far as I can tell, so the only reason you would want to replay it is for the sake of wanting to play it again. On its own the game doesn't incentivize this however.
PLAYABILITY
The game works well at all times.
OVERALL
"Make an average platformer, hire a great composer, slap the Terminator license on it and boom, you got a great seller. Oh but wait, you can't use the license anymore - Crap! Well then just make it its own world and release it." That's what I feel like the game's development looked like. This game is certainly playable and as I said, average, but I doubt many people remember it fondly for being a classic rather than a nostalgic and fun experience, which is fine if that's the case.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Andromeda for GamePro, Issue 16 (Nov 90): "Journey to Silius features great graphics and a dynamite sound track. However, in terms of substance, the game doesn't quite live up to the way it looks."
- Steve Harris for EGM, Issue 14 (Sep 90): "This game is not going to win any awards for being new or innovative, but Sunsoft does manage to introduce some new twists to the standard action/shooting theme." | Steve agrees with my opinion of 30+ years later as far as innovation goes, but I'd like to know what those "twists" are that the game apparently introduces
Rolf's review of Journey to Silius
Top 10 NES game. It's perfect. Captivating plot, blasting visuals, out-of-this-world heart-pumping OST, fluid controls, it's short but filled with more action and challenge than most games, every enemy is placed like in the best stages of Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania or Mega Man, you need to lab this game and figure out every little situation to master it. Don't listen to those saying the game is unforgiving with lives, your character Jay McCray is so durable that you'll rarely die, and there are like five checkpoints in every level.
The Terminator that wasn't
This review is for the Nintendo Entertainment System version
A game similar to Contra that stands out negatively for having only 3 continues, which means playing the first stages of this rough world multiple times is almost guaranteed. Regarding graphics and sound, both are fine.
Controls become a bit annoying when trying to quickly dodge a shot, resulting in that dreaded "input eating" if you need to change direction and jump at the same time, as well as when trying to cancel a crouch into a jump.
The game is somewhat generous with ammunition for your weapons, which you can change by pausing the game and accessing the menu. During my time playing I had to switch weapons several times and it became tiring after a while. HP recharges, on the other hand, are scarce and even though your character can take a few hits before dying, I was constantly asking for more of that red energy.
The last stage is quite irritating, in particular an autoscroller-type section that is full of traps that kill you instantly, so I resorted to using savestates to not lose my valuable continues.
In short, while I recommend playing Contra over this game, Silius is still a good alternative.
Beat in slow motion mode. Game played like a mix of Contra and Mega Man with a very Terminator aesthetic. No shooting up or diagonal but there was a crouch that allowed low shooting. The basic pistol had infinite ammo and fired 3 shots at a fairly fast rate. Most enemies were simple without ranged attacks, while there were others with different movement and shot patterns. I very quickly figured out how to access the inventory to switch to the shotgun, which fired a 3 shot spread straight, up diagonal and down diagonal with a slow rate of fire. It was not good for standard combat and was only really useful to hit enemies that could not be hit by the pistol. The mini boss at the end had semi homing shots that took a bit to figure out, and dropped the machine gun which fired faster than the pistol. The actual boss right after was a helicopter. It stayed high and dropped off some annoying jumpy things that were tough to beat without taking significant damage. Then the helicopter came low and was laughably easy. While going through stage 2 I noticed the better guns shared ammo, which was …
Beat in slow motion mode. Game played like a mix of Contra and Mega Man with a very Terminator aesthetic. No shooting up or diagonal but there was a crouch that allowed low shooting. The basic pistol had infinite ammo and fired 3 shots at a fairly fast rate. Most enemies were simple without ranged attacks, while there were others with different movement and shot patterns. I very quickly figured out how to access the inventory to switch to the shotgun, which fired a 3 shot spread straight, up diagonal and down diagonal with a slow rate of fire. It was not good for standard combat and was only really useful to hit enemies that could not be hit by the pistol. The mini boss at the end had semi homing shots that took a bit to figure out, and dropped the machine gun which fired faster than the pistol. The actual boss right after was a helicopter. It stayed high and dropped off some annoying jumpy things that were tough to beat without taking significant damage. Then the helicopter came low and was laughably easy. While going through stage 2 I noticed the better guns shared ammo, which was lame. I never once got a health pickup while getting plenty of ammo drops when I was full or near, while never getting ammo when I was actually low. I mostly used the pistol, only switching to shotgun for enemies that were too high up, and machine gun for the mech mini boss. Had no ammo for the boss to try out the laser. This boss took a lot of save state scumming as it lobbed mortar shots at my position while periodically closing in for melee. Stage 3 was not too bad but some of the jumps were obnoxious. The guy was incapable of falling straight down making it feel like he had magnets to attract him towards the enemies for contact damage. And enemies placed just past a pit to cause a cheap death. It was a good thing his hp bar could take several hits but many places in the game felt impossible to get past without taking damage. The mini boss here was one of the toughest parts of the game for me, to the point where I looked up a walkthrough. Unload homing missiles to kill it quickly. Oh, well I used all my ammo getting there. It relentlessly closed into melee range while firing several projectiles that were too close together to jump over. At decent range most of those shots went into the ground if I was standing still when it began the salvo, so I could jump and do some damage. But the shots were impossible to avoid at close range and there was no opportunity to get over the boss without taking contact damage. I had no choice but to just eat the hits and barely scrape by with low hp. The boss afterwards was easy though and more like a puzzle because it was a stationary wall with very specific shot pattern.
Stage 4 was more difficult platforming and less enemies requiring the shotgun or homing missile, so I actually had ammo for the mini boss this time. It was similarly relentless but with a slightly easier shot pattern. I blew most of my ammo on homing missiles to get him down while still suffering significant damage. The boss was another stationary pattern puzzle, easy. The final stage had no enemies and was entirely autoscrolling platforming. It was not fun. The mini boss was a ship bigger than the screen that spent the entire time in melee range trying to crush me to the floor. I hated this fight. Only the very front and back of the ship took damage, while most of the fight was spent in a very tight space trying not to get crushed, shot or burned. I quickly destroyed the back with grenade launcher then had to endure the trip back to finish off the front. The final boss was laughably easy once I figured out the correct timing to jump over him.
This game was largely hit or miss with me. The music rocked and the vibe, backgrounds and enemy art were very good. I liked having the entire stash of weapons to swap between but ammo was too limited. The difficulty was a bit too high in the cheap unfair way, and most of the mini bosses were more difficult than the actual bosses. The story definitely felt tacked on and not representative of the actual stages and enemies. It was fun but could have been a lot better.
7.0/10