ActRaiser

"An excellent platformer with some fun city-building elements."

After years of noticing Actraiser in my local "old school" game store and never experiencing it, I decided it was about time I played it. Here are my thoughts on it:

Story: 6/10

The story is pretty simple, but it does its job. Essentially you are the "Master" of this world and it is your job to drive away the demons that have inhabited it in order to let your people live peacefully on it once again. And so you move around on your floating temple along with your angel helper driving away the demons and watching over your fledgling followers. After driving away enough demons, you will end up meeting their master and attempt to vanquish him from your world.

Gameplay: 8/10

The gameplay is definitely the high point of Actraiser. Now, since this game is not only a platformer, but also a sim game of sorts, I'll describe both of them for you. The first part you'll encounter in the game is the platforming section. Now, you'll only encounter these platforming sections when you are either clearing the demons away from a civilization for the first time or when your civilization is half-way through it's growing process. In these sections you control a statue that receives life from the Master in order to do his will. The statue is always the same in every location, though, and besides its magic attack (which you can change in your floating temple) it will always have the same abilities.

Upon receiving life, you'll find yourself equipped with only a sword, and your goal is to jump and slice your way through each level trying to reach the boss. The enemies are varied nicely from location to location, though I found that they hardly ever posed a challenge. On your way to the boss you'll have the chance to hit lanterns that hold various power-ups, such as extra points, an apple to refill your life, and an extra guy. Later on in the game you can also cast magic, though it is limited to how many times you can cast it per level.

After defeating the platforming portion, you will now have to move on to the sim portion. I found these portions to be very fun. You start out with a temple and you can tell your subjects where to build roads in their local area. While they go about building roads and houses by them, you will have to control your angel helper as you try to repel flying demons away from your people. However, these demons will never stop coming unless you direct your people to certain blue circles where the demons spawn at. After getting your people to the demon circles, they will seal them and that in turn stops the demons from attacking. This is made a bit more complicated by the terrain in your local area, though. For example, your people can't build roads on marsh-lands or snow, so you will have to use your "miracle" powers to change the terrain to grasslands. Your people will also offer you offerings which you can take with you and use to benefit other civilizations.

It should be noted that there is also an element of RPG gameplay in Actraiser. You will level up when the total population of your cities reaches a certain point, though this only affects how many health bars you have.

Graphics: 7/10

The graphics are what you would expect for a SNES game. Hopefully no one is looking at this review for me to tell them what I think about the graphics. The sprites are rather large on the platforming sections, yet everything moves fluidly. On the city-building portion everything is rather small, as you are looking down upon your city. Don't worry about the graphics too much, Actraiser has very good graphics a SNES game.

Music: 7/10

The music was catchy, and I really enjoyed the music in the city-building portion of the game. I found the platforming sections to be a little overbearing in how dramatic the score was, it seemed to be more suited for just the boss battles, not the whole level. If you play through the game, be sure to turn up the volume in the city that discovers music.

The sound effects were fairly standard; there was nothing too special about them.

Re-playability/Extras: 6/10

There aren't many reasons to replay Actraiser unless you just really loved it. It should be noted that there are 3 difficulty levels that you can choose before starting a game: easy, medium, and hard. Being a SNES game, you can't really fault it for not having many extras.

Overall: 7/10

A good game overall and I'm sure it was exceptional for its time. It should be fairly easy to find, and if you still have your SNES running like me, I'd pick it up as I'm sure it will be fairly cheap as well. Well, those are my thoughts on Actraiser. Have fun and keep playing!

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/17/07

Game Release: ActRaiser (US, November 1991)