Big Sky Trooper, for SNES

Rating: 4.5/10; Below Average

Don't play this game. Watch a let's play if you are that curious.

This game is kind of a top down shooter action adventure with rpg elements. It is a lot like The Legend of Zelda 1 and 3, but more of a shooter and mired in obnoxiously bad game mechanics. There is really no saving grace either, because the story and characters are too corny to even be funny. The player characters have heads that are too big for their bodies, with eyes and mouth that is too big for that. It has an overly exaggerated cartoony art style that really does not suit the save the galaxy plot. About the only thing of interest in the entire game is wondering what the slugs actually are, given that they are from another dimension, can combine together to make stronger forms, seem to be corrosive with their contact damage to the player, and can only be harmed by advertising and energy weapons. Prepare the neon signs!

The game starts with a slightly annoying and pointless opening that serves to demonstrate just how corny and dumb the story will be. Then you get access to the bridge of your starship. There are save tubes deciding which save slot to use, a health station for converting fruit into hp, a trapdoor style airlock and the main screen where you can talk to the ship's computer and travel around the galaxy. It takes a little while to get into any action and you are encouraged to learn how to play by talking to the AI. The star chart screen shows your location, and a map with icons to indicate places you can go and roughly what kind of place it is. There are links joining places and you can't travel somewhere unless following those paths. Only some locations are available at the beginning with others opening up as the game progresses. Your ultimate goal is to complete the specific quests that your AI gives you, while everything else is optional. The quests will take you to a number of planets where you have to find a specific item or talk to the 1 other person actually helping against the slugs. Then do a mini dungeon with mini boss to reveal more of the star chart. The do a bigger dungeon with a boss. Repeat. The premise itself is already tedious but the actual mechanics of the game make it an absolute chore.

Where to begin. First off the star chart (and the planets when you beam down but thankfully not the dungeons) scroll infinitely in the 4 directions looping around on itself, which is incredibly disorienting. Ever hear of a rectangular map? The kind where you can actually remember where you and places are so as to properly navigate? These developers apparently have not. And don't expect any kind of in game map either. The best the game offers is a consumable item that lets you control a fly to scout around. Before I go into detail on the planets I want to say that traveling between them requires relays to be put in orbit. You can travel to any location with a relay in orbit instantly. Well except for the unskipable animation of the ship folding up and then unfolding at the destination. In order to travel to a place without a relay you need to travel from an adjacent location that has a relay. So you need to set up a transportation network but guess what; you don't get enough relays for every planet. So you will have to recollect them to go to new places. There is a way to make more as you progress through the game, which involves finding 2 types of items and going to a specific planet. Before you can go down to a planet you must defeat the local spacecraft in a clunky Asteroids minigame. If I wanted to play Asteroids I would play Asteroids. Your ship is a cumbersome piece of garbage that can only shoot 3 projectiles at a time in 8 specific directions. Of course the enemies are faster and there are considerable blind angles where your ship can't shoot. The enemies also go off screen all the time where they can't be hit. For some reason you can also go off screen, but that is like using a blindfold. So combat becomes shooting randomly in all directions in hopes of hitting something, trying to lead your shots to hit the unpredictable enemies, or getting them point blank where your blind spots are minimized. On the plus side there are a few different types of ships that are more difficult with different behaviors. But you need upgrades from black holes to hurt them. Another plus is that you get 2 new kinds of weapons that function differently and all 3 are bound to different buttons.

After defeating the ships you are treated to the joy of foot combat and exploration. Each planet is tiny; usually only a few screens but they seem much larger with the way the map loops back on itself. I guess that is accurate for traversing the surface of a sphere, but in the real world you can't walk the entire circumference of a planet in seconds. You have to kill all the slugs on the surface to take control and be able to put a relay in orbit or complete quests. Many planets have other hazards and annoyances, such as local enemies that won't attack slugs but will attack you, mazes, obscuring canopy or ceiling, mazes combined with obscuring ceiling, water, lava, open space and ice. Of them all ice is the most annoying because you have absolutely zero control over yourself while sliding. There is no tool in the game that counteracts ice so you are expected to slide around bouncing off stuff until you get the angles just right to get where you need to go. Wasn't too bad on turbo mode but imagine actually having to sit there and wait for your character to come to a stop normal speed so you can try again. Combat is frustrating. Slugs can combine up to 5 and you have to damage the group enough for 1 to break off, then kill it before it can combine again. However this is easier said than done because the little buggers run away while taking pot shots at you. Meanwhile as soon as you turn your back the big ones rush into melee to do contact damage and knock you around. The controls are atrocious, the hit detection is wonky and the default weapon is complete garbage. The D pad controls both movement and facing for aiming, so of course it is extremely difficult to aim without also moving, especially diagonally. There is no way to lock onto targets, strafe or otherwise aim without moving, making the power armor you wear feel more like a cumbersome piece of construction equipment rather than the cutting edge military tech the game makes it out to be. Probably why it has that stupid red hazard light on the top. The starting weapon shoots electricity at a SLIGHTLY longer range than the slugs can toss their ooze balls, but it does not cover the entire screen and frequently hits nearby cover instead of enemies. The slugs also seem to get some invincibility frames when they split, pretty much guaranteeing they will either run away or recombine before you can kill them. It takes a lot of shots to kill anything more than a single slug, so long that it is highly likely you will take damage before killing anything. Seriously, the game makes you feel so incompetent that the only way you are winning is through the sheer truckload of hp you get.

There are a number of consumable items and offensive spells that make the combat more bearable. Neon signs can be placed to kill a couple slugs that touch it, even directly killing them from a stack. The signs despawn after a short while though. Fuel drums are even harder to use because you have to place 1 then go into the inventory to switch to the igniter (which is not located next to the drum so you are looking at a half dozen or more button presses), then turn around and shoot the drum. The igniter has less range than your electric beam. If you think using a weapon that tedious and restrictive in battle is a dumb idea, it is the only way to harm the recurring major boss. So 4 times you will have to place those barrels and try to ignite them when the boss is close enough to be hurt, all the while he is shooting you, meleeing you, and knocking you around. Nevermind how they don't give you enough drums to beat the boss, expecting you to farm sufficient quantity, and how the later fights also have annoying environmental hazards. This is easily one of the worst boss mechanics I have ever seen. And it gets worse. Those spells you use that cost mana and include things like: more powerful weapons, snorkel to traverse water, jet pack to traverse space (but not anything else!!!), ice ray to traverse lava, and slug form to traverse enemy ships, which is what the final dungeon is. You unlock new spells as the game progresses and they are represented in a 3x3 tile grid consisting of 4 modules with different facing connectors, a power generator, 1 blank tile and the rest useless metal tiles. The active spell that is used when pressing the magic button depends on which combination of modules is powered. So you have to do a sliding tile puzzle EVERY. TIME. YOU. WANT. TO. SWITCH. If I wanted to solve sliding tile puzzles I would play a game that only has those. It is not too complex with 2 or 3 modules, but at the end when you have all 4 and will need to use almost every spell, it is unbelievably frustrating and a massive drag.

While you are off doing your thing the slugs can attack and recapture planets. It does not happen often and seems to follow the routes between planets, so there is a bit of a strategic aspect to the game. You can spend money on fast food franchises to set up on planets to prevent the slugs from attacking. They also instantly kill every slug on the planet so I found myself saving them for particularly annoying maze worlds, or water worlds where I did not feel like switching to the snorkel, or late worlds with tough enemies. The dungeons feature infinitely respawning enemies and mazes. One way doors, switches where only 1 can be on at a time, conveyors, one way teleporters and pits, obscuring ceiling and invisible path surrounded by pits. The game sure likes making everything a maze challenge, and the amount of backtracking you have to do makes the already mind numbing tedium even worse.

The only way that this game could be worse would be if it had time limits, escort quests, quick time events, limited lives or game breaking bugs. The best that can be said about the game is that it works as intended. It is just what was intended is not good, not fun, not worthwhile.

Con

• Tedious buying and selling
• Enemy loot drops despawn quickly
• Stupidly long animation for picking stuff up
• Everything else