Super Stardust HD was a great game for the PSN.
I was incredibly fun, simple but also complex.
It was a game that was very difficult to put down.
And I had been waiting desperately for the sequel.
Well it is finally here, as a launch title for the PlayStation Vita, and I couldn’t
be happier with the final product.
It is pretty much the same game as Super Stardust HD.
You are a starship, orbiting around a planet and must fight off asteroids and enemies.
You have two main weapons, fire and ice.
Each enemy is made of one of these, so you have to switch between the weapons with the
touch of the shoulder button and you need to be fast in order to destroy them.
While fire does damage to fire enemies, it doesn’t do practically anything against
ice.
The rock crusher has been eliminated, but it makes the gameplay simpler as you only
have to switch between the two.
The game uses the dual analog stick of the Vita, move your ship with the left while shooting
with the right.
The Vita’s analog sticks work very well, and have not given me any troubles.
But being on the Vita offers many new ways to play the game.
You can tilt the system and that will move the view so that you can see more of the planet.
Oooooo, ahhhhh, exciting, isn’t it.
Ok, that is not the major addition that the Vita brings.
You are given new special powers.
You can unleash a swarm of missiles or drop a black hole that sucks in everything around
it.
These are controlled with the touch screens, the front for missiles and the back for black
holes.
This is intuitive but since the back touch screen is so close to where you fingers, you
will find yourself accidentally dropping blacks holes even when you didn’t mean to.
The best part is the game offers the ability to turn off these features.
If you don’t want to use the touch screens and just want to play Stardust with the buttons
you can.
You can select either “Delta” which uses all the touch features, or you can select
“Pure” which uses the face buttons.
This amazes me, and in a completely good way.
The developers didn’t feel the need to force these new ways to play on you, instead simply
offering them for those who want them.
I personally think they add more to the gameplay and the overall experience and I like to use
them but it is cool that they offer the choice to turn them off.
The game gives you many different ways to try these new gameplay feature.
There is your arcade where you play through the planets and try to post the highest score
on the online leaderboards.
Or you can go to the planet mode, that just have you on one planet.
But the game also offers plenty of mini-games that each make full use of the Vita’s features.
They are all different from one another but each one is fun on its own right.
There are five different ones, with more coming through DLC.
My favorite is “Disc Slide,” where you move a disk with the touchscreen, and destroy
blue enemies and avoid the red ones.
They are all fairly basic but will have you coming back for more.
Super Stardust Delta does exactly what Super Stardust HD did, and that is offer a simple
but complex experience that is very easy to pick up but even more difficult to put down.
And with the new Vita features, it just makes a great experience, all that much better.