SolarStruggle Review

SolarStruggle is a shooter set in space in the year 2169, where the far corners of the solar system have all been explored. You play a young pilot who escapes death, and ends up involved in the politics of the time and the battles that it entails.

The campaign lets you play 11 different levels, set in different parts of space. You have different objectives which all have a story behind them. Although the game is 3 dimensional, all of the battles take place on a 2D plane, making it a lot easier to control and fight.

At 400 Microsoft Points, it’s not one of the cheapest indie games, but for that price, you are pretty much buying an Xbox Live Arcade Game – it is so in depth and you have hours of gameplay there, so much so that my review for this game took a lot longer than I had first expected for an indie game.

The first thing you realize when you start to play this game is the amount of time and effort that went into it. For an indie game, the graphics are phenomenal. There is also a small, narrated film at the beginning of the game that tells you about the story of the time.

Once you get into the gameplay, you realize how detailed this game is. There is a good variety in the amount you can customize on your ship – from the amount of armor and shields you have, to the different types of guns and missiles you can equip. Of course, as you progress through the game, more and more of these add-ons are available to use.

Your first mission is a tutorial; teaching you the basics of how to move about, fire your weapons and so on. The tutorial is very handy as you cannot progress to the next part until you have fully achieved what you have been asked to do – such as move through an asteroid field within a certain time, or hit a target with your weapon. The controls for the game take a bit of getting used to, and felt a bit odd at first. However, after a short space of time playing the game you get used to it, and you see your accuracy rating increasd significantly.

During the ‘actual’ missions, you are given your objectives. These objectives have a bit of variety to them, but usually involve gunning down or blowing up ships. Sometimes these can be harder than it seems though. You are often given a time limit to destroy something, but other ships’ trying to kill you first distracts you. This then means you often forget or put off fulfilling your objective, meaning you fail the mission. It makes for brilliant gameplay – don’t get me wrong – but it’s frustrating when you realize that you can only start a level from the very beginning. So if you die in the last part of a mission that you have already spent a good chunk of time doing, you will have to do everything all over again. It teaches you not to mess around and focus on the job at hand, but sometimes you’re just too overwhelmed by enemies anyway that you pretty much can’t help but kick the bucket. My main problem with this was in the final mission, and when I finally completed the final mission, I realized that the point where I kept dying was probably about half a minute before the end of the game.

The story for the game is brilliant – it’s so in depth, enjoyable and believable. It’s not a short campaign either – with 11 missions to complete. The only real problem I had with the story was the ending. I don’t want to ruin anything for anybody, but for me it was an anti-climax and a bit disappointing. However, I didn’t let it get me down for too long as I still had another game mode to play!

Skirmish is the other mode available on the game. It involves you defeating waves of enemies, and at the end of every wave is a boss (who, admittedly, I found extremely hard to kill). If you kill lots of enemies in a short space of time, you get multipliers, and defeating certain amounts of waves unlocks better ships for you to use. At the end of every wave you have the opportunity of improving your ship including upgrading your weapons. Oh, and this mode is timed which makes it a LOT harder – especially the boss’ who are designed to be faster that you are.

Overall, for 400 Microsoft Points, you are buying an impressive indie game. For this price, you are getting a very good game and I would recommend it, especially to those who enjoy flight simulation games. The campaign is fun, the story is detailed, and the graphics are commendable.

SolarStruggle is now available to download from the Xbox Live Marketplace.