Shooter: Starfighter Sanvein Review (Playstation 1)

Sanvein at its core is an overhead arena shooter like Robotron or Smash TV, but it has a heavy weight to the movement. Turning has a momentum which is affected by which of the three main weapons and three 'body part' you choose. Each body has slightly different turning and movement speed giving which in turn gives the three weapons a noticeably different feel as a result.

Shooting any weapon pushes you back a little and importantly slows you down. This is better than you may think. You move fast, real fast, enough that controlling your speed and momentum gets difficult if you don't tactically shoot to slow yourself down.

The enemies in this game exists to pressurize you into making mistakes often splitting up trying to surround you if you give them too much time. Regular enemies only shoot when given enough time to. Bosses however tend to attack ferociously or tactically push you away while laying traps you'll have to navigate to get in range to shoot them. The real enemy here is you. Got a bad habit? Work on it. You'll get a little better each playthrough because if you take too many risks you'll waste time in the long run.

You start on a grid divied up into hexagons from the grid you pick which hexagon to attack, you can only attack the areas touching the ones you have cleared. If you have more than one cleared hexagons connected to the next stage you get a damage multiplier which will let you bust through the connected stage faster. Each grid has a few sub boss hexagons and beating all sub bosses takes you to the grid boss.

Instead of lives this the game uses time means you have to clear each stage as fast as possible to stand a chance of beating a full run.

Trying a direct route with no damage multiplier? Well prepare to die and waste a bunch of time. Getting hit takes a lot of your remaining time and when times up its game over. There are no continues my friend...

(unless you switch them on in options!!!)

What you have to do is balance clearing stages to increase your attack multiplier but not so many you're wasting your time its simple risk vs reward. Risk can be reduced with practice and skill but if you underestimate a stage or overestimate your skill your risk goes straight back up.

So Sanvein quickly becomes an adrenaline fuelled ego checking glorious mess in your first few games but as you get a grip on what's happening, and you'll soon enter the zone of pure adrenaline vs ego and execution.

You quickly get intoxicated in a competition with yourself, you'll do less bad each time, when your session is up, and you feel it might be time to take a break you are taunted by whoever is making you attack these machines.

You're quickly pulled back in for the next round, with the slick constantly moving animations keeping you amped between load times. As someone with ADHD this game is amazing everything is constantly moving and the rewards are instant, and the game encourages reckless play by design.

The presentation is beautiful the stages are simple and look a lot like the Metal Gear Solid VR missions stages or silent bomber's arena. It maanges to remain beautiful and mesmerizing as the background contually scrolls attempting to convey a fight through space but it can be a bit headache inducing at times, you'll need to mentally filter out the background movement to focus on the arena, once a stage is completed the borders of the arena flip over showing cleared as your ship flys out and a sweet breakbeat song starts, continuing into the grid to select the next stage. Even the menus have a nice blue tinted ship with a CRT like rolling scan from top to bottom The music is seemingly aggressively compressed with low bit rate sounds dominating everything, The sound seems far lower quality than is really needed on ps1. I think it might have been a way to reduce ram usage as stages load very quickly even on real hardware but it can makes the music feel 'powerless' at times.

There's not much to unlock through play, but the weirdest one is a reverb option. Yes really! A fully customizable reverb setting is on this! Without the reverb on the game sounds shrill weak and sporadic with only emptiness between the low bit rate sounds. If crank up the reverb, and you'll enter the true halls of sanvein's world as the shots and explosions ring out into the parts you can't see, but you know are there.

There aren't many songs sadly the amen break stage completion jingle is great and the drawn out forlorn game over melody imparts a sense a tragedy before it immediately tries to pull you back in with its recurring hook

This game really caught me off guard, I got it for a £1 in perfectly good condition. I thought it might be some fun to try this game again I had forgotten just how engaging it is how it constantly keeps you coming back for more it is so much more than the sum of its parts. A solid Aracde shooter with simple but compeling choices to fine tune the ship weapon and difficulty.

Every moment of success can quickly be erased but only if you become complacent to the challenge, if you have some spare time and the freedom then, maybe...

A note for emulation users:

I urge anyone using emulation to stick to original disk load speed or a minimal increase, loading screen have detail and charm which is lost when the game loads instantly, even the biggest load at the start of the game has a neat radar slowly sweeping to a complete circle, after which the success logo shows, providing both the company logo and a load finished confrimation in one, neat touch! Also Don't use widescreen hacks I made that mistake getting footage and honestly the visual style suffers a lot and some 2D art elements end up pushed out of its actual spot!

Success went on to make other shooters like Psyvariar which I have a real soft spot for too, another one where a seemingly simple game style immediately gets cranked up by art and mechanics encouraging reckless gameplay. I want to look at Psyvariar too in a later review, oddly enough I got that for a pound years ago as well and was also a delightful surprise for me.

Thank you for reading my first review, I'm new to writing stuff and this review was adpted from a script I originally intended to make into a youtube video, unfortunaley I have fibromyalgia and chronic migrane both interfere with my focus and using the computer especailly the mouse (hand wrist arm shoulder pain etc..) and editing video and audio is a long process and can be painful quickly. All in not fun, so i thought id try something new instead!

I've been Caret^Azerty serving you everything you wanted to know from A-Y!!