THE DEEP FREEZE
TRASHSTORM IS NOT A REAL STORY.
IS NOT EVEN GOOD FICTION.
IS TRASH GAME REVIEWS.
ALL OF THE GAMES FEATURED WOULD CAUSE A PERSON DISAPPOINTMENT,
ANGER, FRUSTRATION, DEPRESSION, MONEY LOSS INCLUDED.
TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME.
Time to review more Xitilon/Xitilonic Arts games, This is gonna be a double feature since I'll be reviewing not one, but two Xitilon shmups.
Let's go with "Part I": SoulFrost.
Slide and Shoot, the rejected game of Winter Games.
If you've readed my review of Void Source, you'll surely remember that I said SoulFrost would be reviewed soon. Well, that soon is "Now Playing". Soulfrost, also known as SoulFrost Remastered is a shmup that tries to combine two different play-styles in one small package, but it turns out to be a failure.
To begin with, your game begins as this mix of shmup and ice-skating thing where your objective is to reach the goal without falling to the abyss, otherwise you'll be starting the level all over again. Also, you should avoid or destroy the spikes on the surface and the thin ice areas, and this is where the problems begin. To destroy the spikes you've must shoot, and each bullet consumes your energy, which is like the "secondary" energy bar, and to avoid the obstacles you have to take off and fly, and that also consumes energy. Another problem is how cryptic the thin ice sections of the layout are. You're sliding and with no warning the ice breaks and your poor humanoid soldier falls through its death. I guess they were trying to be like the crumbling floor traps from Super Metroid, but there you had the chance to tell the difference as soon as a few pixels of Samus' feet were in contact, giving you a chance of walk away and then gain speed with the Dash button to run without falling down. In SoulFrost, this is more like the horrendous water sections of Super Contra 2, the infamous Contra hack of "Water where Bill can swim, and water where Bill dies".
One more thing: Say hello to Turridamage because on either ice sliding or boss fight, your HP will drop like nothing since there's no afterhit invincibility.
Boring boss battles put fun in the absolute zero.
At the end of the sliding segment, you'll be fighting the boss of that area. Like in the sliding parts, you have to be precise with your ammunition too and kill the boss within the time limit, since your weapon energy also depletes as a timer of some sorts, and it doesn't matter if its the "Function" or "Energy" bar which depletes first, one of them down and the boss battle restarts with the energy and HP left at the start of the fight.
The cold question of "return and try again or advance?"
After completing a level, you can decide if you want to go to the next level or repeat the previous stage and try again. Returning and try again will be the exercise of Trial-and-Error of this game, since returning and retry could make you advance to the next stage with more or even less energy bars than before, and to get trophies you have to clear the level, clear with a worse result than your previous attempt, and there try again with a better result. This is possible in stage 1, but my question here is "What the fuck were they thinking?" Who on his/her right mind would play erratically to deliberately fail just for the sake of trophies? That idea is fucked up. Also, why not giving the player a slight refill between levels, I mean a 25% recovery wouldn't hurt, especially when your energy drops like if it was nothing.
Well done, all the world is dead, there's no one to save.
At the end of the game, you'll be meeting this woman who tells you a speech about frozen people and worlds and tries to be funny by asking "Tea?".
Right after that you'll get a cheat code to enter a "Secret Battle" mode.
Boss Rush "Out of Control".
After entering the cheat code given during the ending scene, you'll be in this "Boss Rush" where you will battle the bosses of the game, but all at once. This means bullet hell will break loose upon you. Although you're given thrice the amount of HP, your weapons energy are the same defaults as the regular game. Having a larger life bar might be useful, but the Turridamage problem just delays the inevitable: You're gonna be killed very fast, forcing you to restart the battle 3 or 4 times before winning the game.
Got the trophies! Well done!
After finshing the secret battle, you'll be sent back to the title screen. No ending, no "Congratulations", no nothing.
Just you and the trophies you've got are the only reward for playing this game.
That's the "best" part of the whole game.
The graphics are basically dead, being a frozen world doesn't mean to be that monotonous at the point of being almost monochrome, making things look boring, empty and even depressing. The only good part is in the opening cutscene where we have this MS-DOS-ish CGI that manages to evoke the old school computers quite well and perhaps it is the best part of the whole game, along with the tunnel effect on the first stage's background which is reminiscent of Cybxus Heart. The music is your generic techno-beat themes in the style of the 2000's industrial techno beats, but on this game are simplistic and they have a sensation of "meh" after hearing them. Forgettable is the best way to call it. They give you the option of play the game with a "Retro" chiptune-ish arrangement, but that's only if you want another trophy for playing a stage with that music.
A blazing death is what this game deserves.
SoulFrost is an horrendous exercise at retro-gaming. With lifeless graphics, horrible gameplay and dull sound, this game has nothing to offer, except for trophies, but that's not gonna be comforting enough after the "Cold as Ice" fact of realizing how five dollars went down the drain in this mediocre shmup.
This result in the Lea Scale was going to be inevitable.