Thread: Satazius

It almost appears pointless to credit novel arrival Nyu Media with fixing on Satazius – the game was already in English and apart from translating a couple of out-of-game paragraphs of rear story text, their input here looks rather minimal. Thus is the rear story, to be honest – space pirates are worse, and you’ve acquired to battle your way via a solar system full of them. You’ve acquired a highly enhanced starfighter with plenty weaponry to wreck worlds – what are you awaiting for?


Were it not for the somewhat higher display resolution, Satazius could pass for a long-missed SNES game. The sprites are pointedly low-fi, using a deliberately limited palette, and animations are often managed in a blocky pixel-rotating style like to the SNES’s Mode 7 effects.



In a genre today heavy with squeaky-voiced magical girls and fan service, this one harks rear to the 90s, where everything a shooter required was a spaceship, an evil armada to blow up and a boatload of lasers. Though the retro aesthetic is solid, the art direction of the game doesn’t function out thus well, with things seeming rougher and more complex as compared to they should, reminiscent of Taito’s Metal Black.


Solid’ is a word that seems to crop up a lot, even. It’s a good word to depict the audio. It’s a familiar pseudo-16-bit range of tunes and effects, extremely like in fashion to their before game Gigantic Army. Much similar to the art, while , the music is possibly small even grungy – the more bass’y synths sounding rough and gravelly, nearly as 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. Only listen to the music in the game play video above for an thought of how it every sounds.


It’s a solid one in terms of difficulty, even. Not too easy, not too hard, although the higher difficulty settings can be fairly brutal. There’s some instants that look unfair at first, but they’re frequent telegraphed in some way that may not appear initially apparent. Every level, you select a main weapon, 2 secondary weapons and a smart bomb from a list that turns above the course of a play via. The power up system is simple adequate – various objects and enemies drop power ups that enhance the level of your primary, currently selected secondary and smart bomb weapons, and occasionally a shield power up that affords you the ability to soak up one additional hit earlier dying.