Rayxanber II

Rayxanber II

released on Jun 07, 1991

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Rayxanber II

released on Jun 07, 1991

Rayxanber II is an Action game, developed and published by Data West, which was released in Japan in 1991.


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Horizontal shoot em up. You start out with a forward shot and can pick up three different kinds of upgrades. Blue adds additional shots a bit of a spread pattern, red is two slower shooting higher damage explosive shot, and green is two lightning shots that penetrate enemies. Each can be charged for a different attack blue shoots around you, red fires homing shots, green quickly circles you. Good music.

What would be a pretty good shooter is held back by some major flaws. Each weapon powerup is attached to a side of your ship, forward, back, or top/bottom and when you shoot down the ship that contains a powerup the powerup is dropped and has pointer that spins around over time to show what side you are going to be attaching it to. Some games with a similar weapon system at least just let you hit the powerup on the side you want it to attach to. Front would almost always be the best choice except for a few situations that you would have to know of in advance. One of those sections is one of the worst moment I've seen in a shoot em up forcing you to fight through enemies and turrets with the turrets retracting into the environment and the enemies possible become invulnerable before shooting an attack that goes through walls. You need to go through a top portion to reach a wall before going backwards through enemies before going down another level to go forward again before the screen catches you. Doing this seems to require a combination of knowing you have to pick up the green attachment and attach it to the back, but only after killing an enemy in front of you likely causing you to use the dash feature to go back and grab it, get through the middle, then grab the other powerup to reattach weapons to your front. Unlike the third game in this series which is excellent the dash feature here is almost completely unwieldy except for one part where the game starts to have a lot of slow down making it more controllable. There is a cool level where you are underneath a large vehicle fighting turrets and other small ground vehicles while dodging the large vehicles legs but it tends to ruin it with an almost overwhelming amount of enemies you have to mash fire to get through and one section that again would require you to know exactly what is going to happen in advance. Some other interesting sections are hurt by the same kind of odd decisions. Flying three three sections you can move between to avoid turrets, blockages, and enemies that launch at you from behind once they are done materializing would have been more fun of the color palette didn't make it so hard to look at. A section where you can and enemies can fly through webbing that can release a bouncing type of mine becomes possible to get through more due to the slowdown. The boss fights are mostly poor either requiring almost no movement or effort to beat them at all or needing you to use the dash feature as you hope to move through closing passages. Like the third game, while the music is great the weapon sound effects aren't when the music gets quieter.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1663303455849713664