Earthion

Я сначала пиратский ром прошёл на MegaDrive, и мне настолько понравилось, что я пошел и купил её в стиме. Абсолютный шедевр, недосягаемый уровень. Графика - шедевр, музыка - шедевр, баланс отличный просто. Это однозначно в десятке лучших шмупов, которые я вообще играл за всю жизнь, а играл я их не один десяток лет.

Great look, excellent sound effects and sound design, and while the music is not Yuzo's best in my opinion, it is very good and well above industry-standard. The shield and sub weapon upgrade system is great, and the levels and bosses make for a challenging but very fun game on Hard and below. However, since your main gun and subweapons do take hit damage and degrade regardless of shields, on Hotshot, you will find the game suffers from pretty severe Gradius Syndrome (losing powerups and being forced to play the game in a more difficult way when you're new than when you're experienced and don't lose them) and you'll be doing your first playthrough of that difficulty mostly without any weapon upgrades. Up to 99 lives are available, so my first playthrough of Hotshot didn't come close to a gameover, but I don't exactly find slamming my head off a wall and powering through the game with lives instead of properly learning it fun. I'm of the opinion that difficult games should not achieve their difficulty through excessive punishment or making the process of learning and getting better artifically longer, and Gradius Syndrome was conceived to eat quarters/bust rentals. It was never implemented to make a game better as a deliberate design choice. This is why it has essentially been abondoned in modern shmups and is only ever used as a tribute to the era in retro throwbacks. I wish it wasn't. Everything else about the retro style is cool; Gradius Syndrome should be left in the past. Despite the rant, Earthion is still great, and is properly balanced on 3 of the 4 difficulties. Hotshot is also definitely doable and in fact trivial with 99 lives, but it's a pain to properly learn because you will have no powerups during initial playthroughs. I suspect most of the best players ripped the rom and used save states to master levels, as this is a much more efficient way of going about it. If you like shmups, you'll like Earthion as it is an interesting take on the genre. Most of the bosses are fantastic, the overall pace of the game is fantastic, the weapons are fantastic, and as mentioned at the beginning of the review, the look and sound of the game is fantastic. If you like retro games, you'll love the aesthetic, and there is a difficulty option for everyone. I'll be picking up the physical Genesis copy when it drops to further support Yuzo and the boys over at Ancient.