Japanese indie studio Astro Port are, in essence, a videogame tribute band. Their games are love-letters to the SNES era, with their previous game – Gigantic Army, also reviewed here – being their fond recollections of Cybernator/Assault Suits Valken filtered through their own particular stylistic prism. Their latest release, Satazius (and their first on Steam and other digital platforms), is their interpretation of the classic Gradius series. It’s a tough act to follow, especially as genre masters Treasure took on the franchise and brought it to an official close. Does Satazius hit the core, or does it fly into a random moai head? We investigate after the break.

It almost seems pointless to credit newcomers Nyu Media with localization on Satazius – the game was already in English (in the style of most classic Japanese arcade games) and aside from translating a couple of out-of-game paragraphs of backstory text, their input here seems rather minimal. So is the backstory, to be honest – space pirates are bad, and you’ve got to fight your way through a solar system full of them. You’ve got a highly advanced starfighter with enough weaponry to wreck worlds – what are you waiting for?

Were it not for the slightly higher screen resolution (though still limited to 640 x 480), Satazius could pass for a long-lost SNES game. The sprites are pointedly low-fi, using a deliberately limited palette, and animations are often handled in a blocky pixel-rotating style similar to the SNES’s Mode 7 effects. In a genre now heavy with squeaky-voiced magical girls and fanservice, this one harks back to the 90s, where all a shooter needed was a spaceship, an evil armada to blow up and a boatload of lasers. While the retro aesthetic is solid, the art direction of the game doesn’t work out so well, with things looking rougher and more complex than they should, reminiscent of Taito’s Metal Black.

‘Solid’ is a word that seems to crop up a lot, too. It’s a good word to describe the audio. It’s a familar pseudo-16-bit range of tunes and effects, very similar in style to their earlier game Gigantic Army. Much like the art, though, the music is possibly a little too grungy – the more bass’y synths sounding rough and gravelly, almost like they’ve been distorted by pushing up through their speaker range – that makes no sense, of course, but it’s a strange sound that might put some folks off. Just listen to the music in the gameplay video above for an idea of how it all sounds.

It’s a solid one in terms of difficulty, too. Not too easy, not too hard, although the higher difficulty settings (unlocked upon completion of Normal) can be pretty brutal. There’s a few ‘gotcha’ moments that seem unfair at first, but they’re often telegraphed in some way that may not seem initially obvious. Each level, you pick a primary weapon, two secondary weapons and a smartbomb from a list that grows over the course of a playthrough. The powerup system is simple enough – various objects and enemies drop powerups that increase the level of your primary, currently selected secondary and smartbomb weapons, and occasionally a shield powerup that gives you the ability to soak up one extra hit before dying.

A single playthrough will last about half an hour, assuming a minimum of deaths and continues. That’s a lot to assume, though. While not particularly hard by shmup standards, this is still a fairly respectable challenge, and those not used to the genre might burn through all nine of their continues on their first play. Death is fairly harsh, downgrading your weapons a notch or two and bringing you back to the last checkpoint you hit, and while lives are given out fairly generously, it’s still easy to burn through them if you get stuck against a certain boss, and can’t make your way through without additional shields or powerups.

This is a Gradius-style shooter, though, and you won’t be asked to weave your ship between tiny gaps in huge walls of bullets. Your hitbox is bigger than in the average shooter, but still smaller than the visible craft, so you can squeak past a lot of threats that still look fatal. Your smartbombs can be used to partially clear the screen of bullets, but aren’t nearly as effective as those in other games. Fortunately, you recharge your bomb gauge every 30 seconds, so feel free to use it often. It’s definitely slower in overall pace than most modern shooters, allowing you a decent amount of time to react to threats, although shots can occasionally become lost in a cloud of explosions.

Level design is decently varied. While generally you’ll be flying from left to right, you’ll occasionally find yourself in a stage that loops vertically, allowing you to fly down or up infinitely and circle back round, or a couple of areas where you’ll be flying slowly downwards or upwards, making homing or spread weapons far more useful. The bosses are a fairly creative bunch, most with multiple combat phases and a good range of attacks, usually telegraphed well enough to do well against them – if not win – on your first try. Some of them might go down a little too easily to certain weapon combinations – like Gigantic Army before it, some of the guns seem unbalanced in favor of the player.

Aside from personal quibbles about Satazius’ aesthetics, there really isn’t much to complain about. Conversely, there isn’t much to heap praise on here, either. It’s a decent, enjoyable side-scrolling shooter in the style of countless others, but if you’ve got a PS2 or have the means to emulate the system, then Gradius 5 offers everything this does and far, far more. Granted, you’ll likely be paying more than $6 for it, but while Satazius does well to scratch that 90s shmup itch, it doesn’t do much to set it apart from the competition either.

If Astro Port are a tribute band, then to paraphrase a great scholar and saint: This is not the Greatest Game in the World, no. This is just a tribute. Satazius is available from almost every major digital distributor for $6 or equivalent. There’s also a demo available on Steam – highly recommended if you’re at all on the fence. Oh, and lastly: The rumors that the game had excessively strict secuROM DRM? False, at least for the Steam version.

[Satazius]

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