Gunstar Heroes

The Good
Where to start? In pure, simple form, this is a raw, undistilled, undiluted, no preservatives added game. Plain and simple. Treasure is a true face of white-knuckle twitch action, kick-you-in-the-teeth gaming.

Gunstar Heroes carries a AAA pedigree: awesome graphics, loud, powerful music and sounds, and like I said, pure, pure, super-fast, unstopping gameplay. It's almost like eating potato chips: a few potato chips aren't enough. Likewise, a few minutes of Gunstar Heroes isn't enough!

The Bad
What's there NOT to like?

The Bottom Line
Any action fan in their right mind should try and grab this game. This is action gaming at its best!

The Good
Gunstar Heroes is to me a very basic shoot em up with decent graphics. However this game is critically lauded & praised so highly that it confuses me.

The Bad
The premise of this game is run & shoot, keep running & shoot some more. Which doesn't require much thought. It is at a frantic pace, but this serves to do bad rather than good. Simply put, it is too fast. With the amount of action going on it is very difficult to keep up.

This game to me is one for the graphics junkies. The gameplay is minimal at best and doesn't have enough going in order to keep your attention. I have however pushed my way through the game, but to no avail. I can't seem to like it.

Although there were some touches that I liked, it's not enough.

To me it's the SNES game that never was. Too many colours, too little gameplay.

The Bottom Line
I think you either love it or hate it. I'm in the latter camp.

The Good
Visually things are nothing short of stunning. Tonnes is going on at a time, the characters are well drawn and move fluidly, with some cataclysmic explosion effects, the scrolling and animation are super-smooth in every direction, and the weapons give off impressive rippling effects. It certainly goes beyond what most people thought a Genesis could do.

There's a good range of weapons available, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, making for interesting choices as you try to decide which two to have at a time, and which to use - if you know which sections are coming up, you might know which weapon is especially useful for that, and should thus be saved.

The different bosses are impressive, all with their own individual traits in terms of their movement patterns and any available 'sweet spots'. The ticking damage meters for them work well too.

The four game worlds are noticeably different in terms not only of appearance, but in progression style, structure and feel. Being able to play them in any order is a nice touch. There's a surprise at every turn, including the auto-scrolling sections, the dice game near the end, and the short celebratory sequences after completing each world

The Bad
The power-ups can be quite hard to collect in pressure situations. The use of unlimited continues means that it's a little too easy - the only plus to this is that more people will get to see the brilliance, which just seems to continue throughout.

The Bottom Line
A truly immense game that everyone should play. Once you look beyond the graphics there's still a lot on offer, all put together with attention to detail and true class. It's a shame the Sonic the Hedgehog games are better known - for all their strengths, they can't match the brilliance of this.