Review
Release Date: 09.15.2004
Platform:
PlayStation 2Developer:
TreasurePublisher:
Konami of America, Inc.Reviewed by
Richard Brownell on 10.20.2007
| Review Rating: 9/10 | User Rating: 8.62/10 |
If you are looking for an old school side-scrolling shooter for this past generation of consoles, there are a number of possibilities for you to choose from. But that number is tiny a one. The shooter genre is drying up, some say. Perhaps everything has been done. Perhaps there really isn't anywhere to go for the genre (we at GAF would disagree, of course). But
Konami knows that even without innovating, there is ample opportunity to perfect the techniques of games past. The development of
Gradius V was handed over to
Treasure, developer of
Ikaruga, and it is clear that they were told to make the best
Gradius to date--no more and no less.
To get it out of the way, I have not mastered the past
Gradius games, so I've approached this installment with a fairly neutral opinion of the series. Of course, I'm usually not good enough to master any shooter, but I do know a great one when I see it.
Gradius V takes many of the good aspects of past
Gradius games and other shooters and melds them together into a fearsome beast that, depending on your settings, can present a newbie a good challenge or make even a bullet hell fanatic cry to their mama.
The core of
Gradius is a side-scrolling shooter. For the unawares, that means your ship faces to the right or left which is where the baddies come from. Shoot them or you will probably die. In
Gradius, you fly the Vic Viper, a highly advanced ship designed to destroy a destructive bacterial life form that stems from the depth of space. Of course, it's been beaten in the past, but it's back. It doesn't take much to craft minimal story for a shooter consider none of us care about it.
What makes a
Gradius game unique is the way that the power-up system works. There is a power-up bar on the bottom of the screen. Get one power-up and the first part of the bar is lit up. Each part represents a different power-up and the most significant one is the "multiple," which adds a node that follows your ship around and shoots when you shoot. Besides that are missiles, doubles, lasers, speed boosts, and shields.
Up to four multiples can be earned to follow your ship around. How they behave is up to you. Before starting any game of
Gradius V, you must select what type of ship you want. There are four types and each one has different attributes for how your power-ups will behave, in particular the multiples. The four types of multiples are freeze, direction, spacing, and rotate. Freeze allows you to lock the clones where they are. Direction allows you to set which direction they will shoot on the fly. Spacing allows you to space them out to the point of firing across the whole screen from top to bottom. And rotate allows you to spin the clones around you like some sort of space juggernaut demon. If certain conditions are met, you can use the weapon edit mode to expand your options even more.
Of course, even the best weapon system couldn't save a shooter with bad level design.
Gradius V, however, has no problems there. Each of the seven levels, and at certain key points in each, starts with some easy ships just to allow you to get some initial power-ups. This is essential because without them, only the best shmup players would survive. Following that, you could run into any number of things, patterns of ships, giant lava-ish bacterial spores, and of course giant alien bosses. Most parts of
Gradius V don't have any kind of bullet hell. There are occasionally points where you need to precise in your flying or you'll run into things and some points where you basically need to memorize what is going to happen to survive. But that's part of the joy of a game like
Gradius V. It's very replayable and each time you'll find yourself playing better. If you somehow get bored, at any point you can have a friend join you for some fantastic co-op.
Gradius V also comes with the standard set of configuration options: difficulty, lives, etc. At one point, you could also submit your scores on the site Konami had set up, but it appears to be offline now. The value inherent in
Gradius V was high at the time I purchased it in 2004 for $30, but at this point you may be able to find it even cheaper and it's an excellent addition to any gamer's library.
