Demanding (cntd.)

Lost ya? Yeah, it gets kind of hectic. Fortunately there is an option to go with simpler controls for novices. A neat option however is the ability to use three special moves at the cost of your shields. You can go insanely fast, (though only for a few seconds) and obliterate everything in your way, use all your weapons at once, or slow down time. All of these are started the same way, by holding down ‘Y’. A line then passes around a triangle, passing points which decide which move you get to use.

Finding the enemy

Before each mission you are allowed to go over the story behind it and upgrade the weapons of your ship. On one of the missions you are asked to protect a convoy of transports from the enemy. A difficult task because having the enemy locked doesn’t mean you can kill him. While you waste precious time to take out one enemy, five others may be battering your transport.

Of course you will first have to find your enemy before you can shoot it down. It is often hard to discern if there is an enemy or not. Most of the time you will be staring out into an empty star field which allows enemies to blend in nicely. Even when locked on, you wonder if you have anything in your sights at all. Not very helpful.

Voices

There is voice acting, in and out of levels but a big problem with the in-level voice acting is that the music and the sound of explosions drown out what people are saying. This forces you to look at their text bubbles, further taking you away from the action.

Probably the most glaring omission is the fact that there is no online play at all. No co-op, no dog fighting. Don’t expect to be playing this a year after it comes out.

If you are going to put enough time into the game, you should easily find Project Sylpheed. enjoyable. However, it is not very ‘pick up and play’ friendly and, to reiterate, way too much is going on for me to follow. On the plus side, the game should have an interesting story and has decent visuals. The hectic and confusing gameplay will take some getting used to. Fortunately the demo was released on the XBOX marketplace recently. Before buying the game, I would advice you to play that first.