SOL CRESTA

Very quality shoot 'em up from the action game experts at Platinum Games. Unique mechanics that involve swapping the order of the player ships to access different shot types. Solid presentation I think, while I know it has received some flack for it's appearance, I don't think it's a bad looking game. Granted it looks much better on a CRT display which I know the average person doesn't have access to. All in all a solid shooting experience for those on the hunt for a good STG!

Excellent Shoot pour les Nostalgiques de la série des Cresta (Moon Cresta et Terra Cresta).

One of the best platinum games, really loved how it implemented input commands like their other action games, like wonderful 101, but not as hard. It makes it for a pretty complex combat system for a shmup, it's kind of like Radiant Silvergun, tons of weapons that works for different kinds of scenarios, some are more useful than others. The score system is quite simple, defeat enemies as fast as possible to get more coins, which then become resources for your ship, like getting more meter, lives, shields and stronger bullets. It's pretty addicting and wish more shmups do something similar. The graphics are a bit rough but I find the artstyle kind of charming, reminds me of Saturn games, but I would say that my major problem is the visibility during gameplay, I find the background a bit too saturated which can make the bullets and hazards a bit hard to see sometimes and some of the hit boxes aren't accurate to the sprites which can make for some cheap deaths. Also, I find it a tad long for a shmup, it's around 1 hour for arcade mode which is a bit tiring in multiple playthroughts compared to other shumps that are 40 mins or less. Something that bother me was that the story mode was behind a paywall, they should have made it part of the base game since it is pretty expensive as it is. I recommend to buy it in sales like I did, while I find the game to be pretty good, I just can't justify paying more than $25 for it, compared to other shmups with the same quality that are around the same price. As for the storymode, it's the classic Kamiya kind of story, it shares a ton of similarities with Wonderful 101, it's good but I really wish it was dubbed, since the game is pretty frenetic it's hard to read the subs while playing. I end up playing on easy difficulty to be able to enjoy the story. I still recommend this game if you are a fan of platinum games or shmups, it's a ton of fun once you learn the mechanics and it is a fresh take on the genre, but wait for a sale to get a fair price.

The game itself is very nice, but offline ranking is the same for all game difficulties and is always the same whether you choose to play with 3 lives or whether you choose to play with 10 lives. Il gioco in sè per sè è molto bello, ma la classifica offline è la stessa per tutte le difficoltà di gioco ed è sempre la stessa sia che scegliate di giocare con 3 vite sia che scegliate di giocare con 10 vite.