The Ikaruga and Sine Mora Review (Part 2)

Now finally we compare the new bullet hell shooter Sine Mora, fresh from Hungaria, to the legendary Ikaruga!

Sine Mora does one thing, that is essential in games of its genre, better than Ikaruga. Or I should say: it actually does it. Sine Mora gives you the ability to practice any boss (from Sine Mora, har har), providing that you reached and thus unlocked them in story or arcade mode. It lets you practice any unlocked boss in something called "Boss Training Mode." You simply open it up, select a you reached boss, and there you are, training; i.e. unlike Ikaruga, Sine Mora let's you NOT have to play entire levels just to practice its bosses. And this precludes a lot of pain.

Sine Mora also looks beautiful; it's the prettiest game in its genre. It uses many vibrant colors and offers bosses as various as the Sentinal from The Matrix and a Giant Robot Spider. Not to say that Ikaruga -- the game we're comparing Sine Mora to -- looks bad; Ikaruga looks good! But it also looks very black and white, and is in Direct X 8, as opposed to Sine Mora's Direct X 9.

Sine Mora is a lot like StarFox64 in that all its characters are talking animals with pilot's licenses. At the same time, Sine Mora is a lot NOT like StarFox64 in that its characters talk about grimmer things, such as rape, torture, nuclear holocaust, execution, slavery, parricide, existentialism, and fucking (literally, with that word). Also the game is from an entirely different genre.

But like StarFox and unlike Ikaruga, there's a lot of story-telling. And/yet/but, even though I played Sine Mora's story mode twice (to get its alternate ending) I still didn't understand the plot. Not that this bothered me, as all the text-slides between missions were interesting, some of them on an intellectual level. Plus they were read in Hungarian, which made the game feel more exotic. The game also features many cutscenes, and avoids repetitive cutscenery by giving you the ability to speed through them; just press the left shoulder button.

Not to say Sine Mora's presentation trounces Ikaruga's. Ikaruga may lose the impressive visuals battle but wins the music battle. Ikaruga's music is cool, inspiring, makes you feel like you're the protagonist of an epic battle. Sine Mora's music, on the other hand, is boring. It's most "exciting" music is its boss battle music. Listen (minor spoiler alert):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dia0IOl8rFw&feature=related

Now listen to some of Ikaruga's music (minor spoiler alert):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGNSdcy-apU

And now on to the most important conversation: Sine Mora's gameplay? Is it better or worse than Ikaruga's?

Worse.

Sine Mora has a few problems with its level design, most of which can be summed up as: the unavoidable death, the kind that you can't possible predict during your first run through of the game. Most of Sine Mora's levels have a point or two where you're going to die during your first run (unless you do your story mode run on "Normal" noob mode, in which case you'll still end up dying some cheap deaths). Most of these deaths come from bosses who have these speed-of-light attacks whose attack path you cannot predict until you've seen them a few times, and whose projectiles you won't be able to dodge when they're already and suddenly flying towards you. Said projectiles are fast and massive, and in some cases the boss is the projectile. Also, there are some puzzles in the game involving the environment that, like the bosses, are located later in their levels, and you'll end up dying to them, perhaps too many times, causing you to have to restart not from the autosave point but from the very beginning of the chapter. And unlike the bosses, you cannot figure out the puzzles in a "puzzle training mode"; you can trial and error your way or look for youtube videos.

Another level design problem is partly a too-much-love-for-fancy-graphics problem. A lot of the time it's hard to tell where you can fly and where you can't, especially during some boss battles. Sometimes you can fly in front of a boss, learning, as you fly over the boss, that it's in the background. Other bosses you'll discover this ain't the case, that the boss is actually NOT part of the background and is instead a giant solid mass of crashingness. And you die.

Trial and error rules in this game (in a frustrating way). It's not like Ikaruga where, except for perhaps one moment, every time I died, I did so because I didn't play well enough. I really get a sense that Sine Mora favors sexy visuals over hot gameplay experiences. Especially when the screen "shakes" during explosions while there are still enemies and enemy projectiles flying all over the place. Or especially when the small, fast, grey-and-thus-hard-to-see missiles show up.

The other other problem with Sine Mora is also something Ikaruga doesn't have. Fat. Sine Mora has a lot of redundant level and boss design. Many players won't notice it, since the visual variety is quite high. But players paying attention to how they're being asked to move their craft will notice that a lot of levels and bosses play out in almost exactly the same way. Whearas in Ikaruga, every situation manages to have its own personality through its gameplay.

But as negative as this may seem, the Sine Mora experience is, I think, just as good as Ikaruga's. The latter game may have the better level and boss design, but it doesn't have a boss training mode.

★★★★☆


Notes: I do not actually know if you can unlock the bosses via reaching them in Arcade mode; I unlocked all the bosses via story mode.