GripShift (PSP)

 This is a review that doesn't feel good to write. The thing is, GripShift is a game with many admirable aspects: it's unique, it's full of innovative and interesting ideas, it feels good to control and move your character around, and so on. Unfortunately, a few negative aspects are so overpowering that they undo all of the above, and the game ends up being less than the sum of its parts as a result.

 

The game's concept is a pretty simple one, that I can't believe I haven't seen being done before or since (well, I guess Sonic R is pretty close, but not quite): it's a combination of 3D platformer and racing game. More specifically, your character is always in their car, and it always controls like a racing game, but while there are a few races, most of the stages in single player mode are 3D platform stages, complete with collectathon items and so on.

 

The stages are of the "islands floating in space" style, and you fail the stage if you fall off it. This is frustrating, but forgivable. Obviously, it's the kind of game, like say, Speed Power Gunbike (a game I love), that gets better the more you improve your skill at playing. The problem is that completing a stage isn't necesarily completing a stage. To explain, the aim in most stages is to figure out how to get to the exit, and then actually get to it before time runs out. If you manage to do this and also beat certain goal times, you'll also get a medal, and some credits. (You get credits for collecting all the stars in a stage, too.)

 

The bronze goal time is shorter than the stage's time limit, and the silver and gold goals shorter still. They really should have just had the bronze time as the time limit, though, as you get no credits unless you get at least a bronze medal, and you need a certain amount of credits to unlock more stages. The credit thresholds aren't low, either: after I'd played through the beginner stages, I had sixteen out of twenty-five credits needed to unlock the easy stages. At the end of the easy stages, I had fifty-two out of eighty-five needed to play the intermediate stages! Now, most of my non-review game-playing time is spent on arcade and arcade-style games, so I have no problem with score/time chasing, but to make it a mandatory part of progression like this is to turn it into an annoying chore. 

 

So that's it, then. GripShift is a game I wish I liked, and I wish I could recommend, just on principle. It's just a shame that all those good ideas are sunk by that one albatross of bad progression. Since this was published by Ubisoft, I'm going to be generous to the devs and assume it was the result of some suit-wearing moron deciding that they couldn't possibly release a short game and trust the players to enjoy it, they had to crowbar in hours of compulsory repetition.

Commando Steel Disaster (DS)

 Okay, so you might notice that all of the screenshots for this reciew are of the game's first stage, and usually, I wouldn't review a game if that's all I could see of it, but this is a special case. Most of my time playing this game was the DSiWare version which I have on my n3DS. I don't have any way of taking screenshots of DSiWare games, though, but I knew the game was released as a regular DS cartridge, so I played that too, for screenshotting purposes. It turns out, the two versions aren't the same!

 

The basic core of the game is the same, of course: it's a pretty decent Metal Slug clone. You go through stages, shooting lots of guys, and occasionally robots and tanks and helicopters. There's a whole bunch of temporary power-up weapons, destructible parts of the stages with hidden items, and most other Metal Slug things. Except that vehicles only appear in special seperate substages, not as thing you can just climb aboard in the regular stages. It's pretty good. Obviously nowhere near as good as the first few Metal Slugs, but maybe in the same league as the later entries.

 

The differences between the two versions are all related to difficulty. The stages in the cartridge version are a lot longer, to the extent that entire sections are removed from the digital version. Of course, I've only seen the first stage of the cartridge version, but the first stage is made up of three sections: one on a jetbike in a forest, one outside in the snow, and another inside an underground military base. The digital version of the first stage, meanwhile, and the indoors section is slightly truncated, as well as the larger gatekeeper enemies having significantly less HP. The enemies in the digital version generally have less HP, and they inflict less damage on the player, too.

 

Which one is better? To be honest, there's no perfect version. The cartridge version is a bit of a chore: I could definitely overlook the difficulty if the stages were shorter, and the bigger enemies didn't feel like such bullet sponges, and while I definitely prefer the digital version's faster pace, it also feels like there's no challenge at all, and most of the times I've played it, I've actually gotten bored and stopped playing the game long before I came close to dying. 

 

So I guess the only conclusion is that Commando: Steel Disaster is a game with two different versions on the same platform, both of which are terribly flawed, in almost completely opposite ways. Just play Metal Slug X instead, is the best advice I can give here.