Darius Gaiden

Review by Taninriff

"Too dang tough and nothing new in the space shooter department..."

Introduction
Darius Gaiden is an arcade port of a space shooter to the PC. This is actually one in a line of space shooters baring Darius in the title. The first was the popular Darius Twin for the SNES.

Story
Story, story, can anyone find a story? Like most space shooters, there really isn't any story. They never give one on the box or in the packaging. If you know the history of the series, then you may know the story. Basically this evil empire creates vast armadas and wipes out all life in the galaxy in a gradual push. For some reason, most of the bad guys ships are based on fish or other aquatic animals. They guess because they come from a world covered in water. Maybe he just likes fish or visited too many pet stores in his youth? This adds a rather cool element to it. When the enemy armada gets too close to your civilization, the Darius ships are launched to counter it. It runs on the basic idea that the bad guys make hordes of cruddy ships and your side puts all the money into one or two all powerful ships. This story is as old as space shooters, except the fish thing.

Gameplay 5/10
This game is very average in gameplay. Its a side view space shooter. You can move forwards, backwards, up, and down. Along the way, you collect power ups from the bad guys to improve your lasers and missiles. The main reason this section loses points is that when you die, you lose every power up you collected! I will cover this more in the replay section.

Graphics 7/10
Very average. To be honest, there are several shooters that put this one to shame in graphics. Even the old SNES Axelay was prettier than this one. It is just very average. Nothing will amaze you, but you won't complain about how ugly it is. This does look decent for a 2d game. It will not take any advantage of your 3d graphics card. With older games like Axelay and Gradius 3 looking just as good and new ones like Zero Gunner 2 and Ikaruga looking better, you won't remember the graphics in this one.

Sound 8/10
The sound effects are very average. Nothing new in the sound area. Standard shots, explosions and effects. The music is pretty good for this game. I really enjoyed the music and it added a lot to the mood of each level. Overall, a very enjoyable soundtrack (for me at least) and very average sounds.

Play Time/Replayability 3/10
Here is where the game hurts. This is simply too tough. You start off in decent shape, collecting power ups and wading through the enemies easily. But then you die and it becomes an exercise in anger management. When you die, you lose every power up. You have no opportunity to collect them again. So you end up in a very hard stage, die, and then you can no longer kill any of the bad guys. It is just very frustrating. I can rip through Ikaruka, Axelay, and numerous others. But this one is just merciless. The replay was almost nothing. I played it a few times. Died and became too weak to fight the opponents. And then I swore at the game a lot. I even thought about micro waving it for 3 seconds to make the cd pretty like all my AOL cds. I decided to stop playing it for fear of banging my head against a wall and ending up in the neighbors apartment.

Final Recommendation
Skip it. There are much better space shooters out there. If you have any of the classic systems, save your money and order the good ones online. If you have the newer ones, just pick up the few space shooters they make for them. This one is just too frustrating and the market has much better ones.