Steel Assault was on my wishlist for long. I saw one trailer and i knew I wanted to eventualy play it. Now that it finally came to playstation I picked it up. Almost bite the bullet on switch a couple of times but never did. For one thing lets get this out of the way.
This game is gorgeous. The excellent sprite work and detailed backgrounds look incredible with a million different effects happening allwhile not being a total distraction. Also I wanna point out I think this game has the best CRT and retro filter i have ever seen in any modern retro game. Usually never use this feature cause it looks awful and doesn't ever gel with the art of the game but here it blends very well. Nothing but praise here.
The game play is also really solid. Levels feel the perfect length and the right amount of difficulty and bosses feel great when you get that edge to victory and trully learn their pattern. The only strong negative i have to the game is that it is really short. 5 stages and each stage is only about 7-10 min long. Once you know the game it can be completed in about 35-40 min. Which I believe is by design but I wish it was just a tad longer like 7 stages. So if your a person that likes to play games just once, this is not the game for you. The real intention here in everything in Steel Assault's design is to learn and master it and utterly destroy it. This game is meant to be a 1CC arcade clear game in a single sitting. I have nothing against this game design and I really enjoyed my first playthrough and starting my second harder play but then this is when the real issue of the game crept up on me.
THE PLAYSTATION version of this game is BROKEN. The game crashes a lot. Not only does it kick you out of the game constantly but it actually has a high chance of corrupting your save. Beating the stage 2 boss and getting into the scene transition to stage 3 crashes a great deal of times. My first playthrough it crashed for me like 5 times in a row and corrupted my save. Even backing my save to the cloud and redownloading it didn't save me much frustration. On my sixth time beating him it papssed successively and i finished the game no problem. Now starting my second hard run playthrough where there are no stage checkpoints the boss crashed on me no lie 10 times before i could advance. Then the game crashed three more times on stage 3 and at this point I had to throw the towel in. This really pisses me off because I was really enjoying mastering this game and i wanted to go for the platinum trophy and try to conquer the 1CC arcade mode but realizing this was never gonna work with this crash rate would only cause me frustration to get so far and lose to a stupid bug. It sucks the big one because this is a game that is meant for repaeted plays and mastering to get your money's worth and now i feel cheated of that. Well thats my experiance with it. Not sure if the switch or PC version fair any better but I can't advise buying this game in it's current state. Fucking sucks cause it kinda soured my experiance with an otherwise well designed game.
This game is gorgeous. The excellent sprite work and detailed backgrounds look incredible with a million different effects happening allwhile not being a total distraction. Also I wanna point out I think this game has the best CRT and retro filter i have ever seen in any modern retro game. Usually never use this feature cause it looks awful and doesn't ever gel with the art of the game but here it blends very well. Nothing but praise here.
The game play is also really solid. Levels feel the perfect length and the right amount of difficulty and bosses feel great when you get that edge to victory and trully learn their pattern. The only strong negative i have to the game is that it is really short. 5 stages and each stage is only about 7-10 min long. Once you know the game it can be completed in about 35-40 min. Which I believe is by design but I wish it was just a tad longer like 7 stages. So if your a person that likes to play games just once, this is not the game for you. The real intention here in everything in Steel Assault's design is to learn and master it and utterly destroy it. This game is meant to be a 1CC arcade clear game in a single sitting. I have nothing against this game design and I really enjoyed my first playthrough and starting my second harder play but then this is when the real issue of the game crept up on me.
THE PLAYSTATION version of this game is BROKEN. The game crashes a lot. Not only does it kick you out of the game constantly but it actually has a high chance of corrupting your save. Beating the stage 2 boss and getting into the scene transition to stage 3 crashes a great deal of times. My first playthrough it crashed for me like 5 times in a row and corrupted my save. Even backing my save to the cloud and redownloading it didn't save me much frustration. On my sixth time beating him it papssed successively and i finished the game no problem. Now starting my second hard run playthrough where there are no stage checkpoints the boss crashed on me no lie 10 times before i could advance. Then the game crashed three more times on stage 3 and at this point I had to throw the towel in. This really pisses me off because I was really enjoying mastering this game and i wanted to go for the platinum trophy and try to conquer the 1CC arcade mode but realizing this was never gonna work with this crash rate would only cause me frustration to get so far and lose to a stupid bug. It sucks the big one because this is a game that is meant for repaeted plays and mastering to get your money's worth and now i feel cheated of that. Well thats my experiance with it. Not sure if the switch or PC version fair any better but I can't advise buying this game in it's current state. Fucking sucks cause it kinda soured my experiance with an otherwise well designed game.