| Assault Suits Valken review |
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When most people think of games that contain robots, they normally wince and hold back a sizeable amount of stomach fluid. The probable reason behind this is the fact that the majority of the mecha genre of gaming contains an inordinate amount of rubbish. There are, naturally, notable exceptions to this rule: the seminal 1992 Super Famicom side-scrolling platformer/shmup Assault Suits Valken is one of them.
The reasons why many regard Valken so highly are numerous; a sublimely intuitive control setup, satisfying weapon load out, involving level design and it looked great for the time. Earlier this year publisher X-naughts (pronounced "crossnaughts") announced they were undertaking a remake of the original Valken for the PlayStation 2. After the dancing in the streets had subsided, a certain amount of anxiety set in. The original development team, Masaya, had partially disbanded and there was serious doubt as to whether X-naughts could pull this off. In brief, they didn't and the remake is yet another sorry effort of a cash-in on a respected gaming legacy.
The original Valken wasn't just any shmup; the level of care and attention to detail, even for the Super Famicom, was (and remains) near-legendary. As your assault suit sped along the ground, blazing its various ordnance, each of the opposing mecha would explode in a satisfying pyrotechnic display. The ejected pilot would scamper off towards a safer refuge. Little details like this helped to make the game more immersive; you weren't controlling a soulless robot but aiding a human pilot in his plight against other human protagonists (the character designs - by Satoshi Urushihara - are also of worthy repute). The aesthetic polish of the game was laudable, precise and gauged perfectly for its host hardware.
The controls were also of similar precision, allowing the player to instigate intricate manoeuvres whilst independently firing off volleys of potentially life-saving salvos. Admittedly, undertaking all this wasn't initially that easy, but the control setup was remarkably transparent and did aid the player through a particularly challenging game. This is something that Valken was though; challenging. Completing all seven levels was no easy task but it was manageable, even with the stringent credit limit.
The remake takes all this great gaming content and blithely throws it all away in favour of misjudged ‘enhancements’, resulting in utter mediocrity.
The graphics are akin to any decent bilinear filter on a Super Famicom emulator and they look consequently very cheap and clearly rushed, especially with the game being run on this generation's hardware. Even the lightsourcing on the assault suit's booster and weapons fire looks fuzzy and more than a little amateurish. What is more, the parallax scrolling that was in the original is no longer present, and to make matters worse certain levels have intermittent frame skip and judder on some of the backgrounds.
The controls are now equally as appalling; the responsiveness and precision has gone and instead it has been replaced by a sluggish and vague setup that has the player inadvertently and unintentionally sliding all over the screen. Moreover, the "hold" function has been doctored to allow fire in two directions. In the original game, using "hold" had the player fix their firepower in a single direction and on many of the zero gravity missions (where 360 degree fire was necessary) made matters distinctly more manageable. Instead, when "hold" is used in the remake, two opposing directions of fire are available. This means, that if you want to drill a hole in a target in front of you (such as the Stage 2 boss for example), matters are made considerably more complicated because each time you back away to avoid shots and obstacles your firepower points in the opposite direction.
In addition to all these control woes, or in spite of them, the game is now made considerably harder. Not to mention the fact that the weapon power of your assault suit has diminished considerably and the AI and manoeuvrability of your opponents has noticeably improved. Therefore, instead of a carefully gauged difficulty curve, the game is rock hard from the off (of which most of the difficulty is attributed to an astonishingly inadequate control setup). The remixed music is also appalling (so much so that certain tracks are actually out of tune).
As if all this nonsense wasn't enough to damn this game any further, X-naughts had the gall to add a suitably crappy "Stage 0" into the mix. This involves having the player undertake a mission where 1) they cannot take any damage and 2) cannot damage the end of stage boss. In the original Super Famicom version this "Stage 0" manifested itself as a rolling, introductory movie to the events in the game. Some muppet thought that something completely adequate and part of the game’s appeal should be made more "interactive". The results are suitably crass and obviously disappointing.
Overall, the PlayStation 2 remake of Assault Suits Valken is a sorely inadequate remake. Even as a game in its own right, regardless of its heritage, it just doesn't work and is unnecessarily cumbersome (not only in terms of aesthetics but also gameplay and controls). For the same money you might as well source an original copy of the game and the hardware needed to play it on.
As with many remakes, and more so than most, this is one to dutifully avoid. To remake a game of such high quality is always a tricky proposition; getting it so badly wrong is nigh-on criminal. |
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System: Sony PlayStation 2
Genre: Shooter
Developer: Masaya
Publisher: X-naughts
Players: 1
Version: Japan
Writer: Ollie Barder
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Pros:
- The game disc makes a nice coffee coaster
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Cons:
- It looks rubbish
- The controls don't work properly
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