Shoot 'em ups, or shmups, for short, are one of my favorite classic styles of gaming. The only problem is that recently, they have been of the 'impossible' type. I'll download a demo, play for a few seconds, and explode. Now, I know there's a ton of people that love that difficulty. It's why the play the game. For those of us who don't have the reflexes of a friggin squirrel, I really appreciate it when game makers make modes for the rest of us. This is what Sine Mora does. It manages to create a nice hill to climb as far as being able to enjoy the game and get better, upping the difficulty at your own pace.
Sine Mora revolves around making the most of the time you have, and in this case, instead of lives, you have a constant countdown to your doom on the screen. You destroys enemies, parts of bosses, and pickup power-ups to lengthen the time to when you explode. If you get hit by an enemy's shot or touch the environment, time is deducted from your timer. This serves as a health bar, where there is no specific number of hits or lives. It makes for some pretty hair-raising attempts to kill enemies as soon as possible, your death mere seconds away. It's a unique method of playing that mas you learning the levels so that you can get those precious kills you need to survive. I liked this much more than the self-prescribed “bullet hell” many other games have you going through on the default difficulty.
There are four modes; Story, Arcade, Score Attack, and Boss Training. In story mode, you play through the seven stages in the game in a deep story involving a few feuding civilizations that are trying to take each other out. The game starts with the near wiping-out of a people, then evolves into a set of smaller stories in which different animal people try to go back in time to fix the events they think need fixing. It's all done in a different language, with some complex emotions and story elements included in the telling. You can play through on Normal or Challenging mode, with the normal mode giving you a fairly large amount of time to start each level, which makes it feasible for almost any player. You also get twelve continues. When I played through the story mode, I finished it on my first play-through with one continue remaining. That's pretty good predicting of difficulty! Challenging mode adds more bullets to avoid and reduces the continues to nine. I enjoyed using this mode to get a feel for the game and a good first look at all of the levels in the context of the story. The characters in Sine Mora also have established back stories which you learn about here.
Arcade and score attack are similar, except in arcade mode you start at the beginning and play for as long as you can through the story (like at...an arcade) and in score attack you try to score the most on a level. What's cool is that you get to choose the combination of plane, special weapon, and special ability you want to use. They call these “chronomes” and there are 62 total combinations to play with. You sorta start to find your favorites for each level as you experiment, while some, you find out, are useless. I spent an enjoyable amount of time finding the optimal set of weapons and power-ups, whether it be a giant laser beam or the ability to slow down time so that you can dodge otherwise near-impossible to avoid shots. The amount of depth the game has to allow you to perfect your game extends into Boss Training mode, where you can play any boss with any power-ups you want and at any difficulty. Getting to learn your enemy while dolling out massive firepower is fun and informative, since getting through the tougher difficulties is a daunting task.
There are leader boards for all modes which load fast and update quickly. There's a good amount of people playing already. One thing I wish they had included was some form of multiplayer game play. Most shmups I play at least have a cooperative mode. If it had a multiplayer mode, I would have given the game a higher score. Making up for the lack of replayability on the 2-player front is the itemized achievement system. Each rank you can achieve in the game has a set of criteria to meet. These range from shooting a certain number of enemies, to finding special secret weak spots on bosses, to playing for a certain amount of times. I hit a snag in my attempt to climb the ranks with a difficult task, and I wish some of them were more defined in their qualifications. Also, I hate that I can't achieve the other tasks of a different achievement before I get the previous one. It makes the chances of getting all achievements very, very hard.
As a whole package, Sine Mora is a beautiful game with gorgeous environments to fly through while listening to a breathtaking soundtrack. It is definitely a buy for shoot 'em up enthusiasts, and for those wanting a game that lets you choose your own pace of difficulty scale. It's one that seems to pull you in with its unique time fighting system and numerous achievements that are ripe for the taking. The team at Digital Reality and Grasshopper Manufacture put together a nice little package, and though it could have benefited from some type of multiplayer, it is still worth the money.
Review Scores:
Presentation: 5/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Graphics: 4.5/5
Sound: 4.5/5
Value Factor: 4.5/5
Bottom Line: A gorgeous shoot em up that excells with a unique survival system and deep ranking system. Made to accomodate novices and experts alike, Sine Mora is a high-quality adventure.
Final Score:
4.5 / 5
