The game features an arcade mode and a story mode (each of which feature two-player, which you can play locally or over XBOX Live). The differences between modes are that the story mode has more boss battles and is much longer than the arcade mode, and that the story mode has a story. I advise you not to play the meatier, storier portion of the game for a bunch of reasons, the first one being: Radiant Silvergun's story mode is boring. Despite featuring the same levels as the better arcade mode and featuring even more bosses, it ends up providing a boring experience, unless you start playing it using a saved game that has all the weapons leveled up and at least fifteen starting lives (I will explain).
You know how in most shoot-em-ups you upgrade your weapons and gain lives during a playthrough, and that the weapons upgrade pretty quickly, and that, when you game over, it's back to square one? Well, in Radiant Silvergun's story mode it isn't like that. Instead, weapons upgrade really really really slowly, and you're expected to save your current level of leveling up when you get a game over, so that when you start the game again, you start from the beginning with your ship as powerful as it was when you died. You also restart with more lives each time you game over with a sufficiently higher score.
I started story mode with a default three lines. I ended up finishing the game restarting with nineteen. In all it took me seventeen hours to beat the story mode.
"How did it take you, reviewer, seventeen hours to beat a less-than-two-hour game?" It's because of two things: my unwillingness to perform the same boss-beating strategies over and over, and also just the fact that I'm not really good at bullet dodging. Oh, and also it took me forever because of cheap deaths, but I'll get to that later. First I want to discuss the over-and-over thing.
Almost all the game's many bosses will require that you place your ship in a certain place and fire certain weapons to win. It's true that skillful dodging is involved, but half of the challenge is figuring out the puzzles: How do I defeat this boss? Figure out the best weapons combinations and ship placements to beat enemy X, and perform it perfectly. This I quickly found really boring, as I ended up doing what I had already figured out fifteen tries ago. And as I played the game over and over again, my subconscious would take over, forcing me to try new things for variety's sake, only to lose valuable lives. The game forces you to figure out its dominant strategies and execute them, like an actor being told to follow a script. Except in this case you don't get paid.
Now, those cheap deaths. You have to memorize when the game is going to do something you couldn't predict when you first saw it, and recall what that unpredictable was. There are probably only four or five of these cheap death-makers, but they're still there, and it's the most inelegant thing in the game. When you forget when one of the cheapnesses is going to occur, and you lose a life to it, it sucks. I've barely lost finale boss battles in part because of cheapness I failed to remember quickly enough.
After beating the story mode, with my save file having all my weapons leveled up to 33 and a nineteen lives restart, three realizations occurred that you should note if you decide to tackle this mode I'm saying you should not tackle: 1) When I finally beat it, I had eight of my nineteen lives left. The final battle wasn't epic because I had followed the script so well. 2) Most of my Radiant Silvergun experience up to that point was a pain. 3) With fully powered up weapons and nineteen lives, a noob could really enjoy the story mode; even the story mode's story is mildly entertaining, and has a pro-apocalypse, environmentalist message, along with subtitles that you are often too distracted by enemies to read; you don't see this type of story-telling often.
Although story mode is only fun if you play it on a leveled up save of someone who's sacrificed an entire day of their life, the arcade mode provides an entertaining experience the moment you start the game. On arcade mode's easiest difficulty settings, you'll still be challenged, but because you'll level up much faster and start with a lot of lives (if you choose the options to do so), and also because the arcade playthrough is shorter, I don't think you'll feel bored with it.
Before I close this review with a score, I should mention the unique score system. In the game there's something called a chain combo. How it works is every time you kill three of the same color enemy (red, blue, or yellow), you get a set amount of points, a pointage that gets squared whenever you stack another three of the same color. Interrupting the combo with the death of an enemy of another color ends the combo. In either Story or Arcade mode you can use this system to compete on the leaderboards by selecting "score attack." I mention this color combo system only 'cause it's unique. This isn't a game with a big leaderboards scene.
In short: Play Radiant Silvergun for its arcade mode; its bosses are among the most interestingly designed in the genre, and the game's only twelve dollars.
★★★☆☆
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