This week’s WiiWare offering is Gyrostarr, an on-rails space shooter from High Voltage Software. It represents a fairly clever bit of engineering in its own way — the game’s press release boasts that through clever use of High Voltage’s Quantum3 game engine, Gyrostarr has managed to squeeze 50 procedurally-generated levels into WiiWare’s 40MB size limit. As always, of course, we ask the question: How do those 50 levels play? Are they worth your 700 Wii Points and 290 rapidly-disappearing memory blocks? Well, to answer those questions, we have to ask this one: Did you ever feel like the bonus stage from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 deserved its own game?
The comparison to the old “half-pipe” sections from Sonic 2 is apt for more reasons than just the fact that the game is played on a half-pipe (but in space). Allow me to copy, paste, and edit the Wikipedia description:
Special Stages Gyrostarr tracks Sonic a spaceship from behind while he runs flies through a (semi-) three-dimensional half-pipe course filled with rings energy balls and bombs enemies. A certain number of rings energy balls must be collected to pass through three checkpoints and eventually obtain the emerald itself go through a warp gate.
To be fair, Sonic couldn’t shoot at all, but the principle and the gameplay are pretty much the same. You race down a fixed path whose curved surface is purely for show, collecting good things while shooting/dodging bad things, and at the end, if your good-to-bad ratio is high enough, you win; if it’s not, you lose. Well, maybe I’m oversimplifying things — Sonic could jump and gravity would slide him down the walls, and Gyrostarr doesn’t do either of those.
To Gyrostarr’s credit, it does look significantly better than a Genesis game. High Voltage has engineered some pretty nice graphics, with the environments and enemies appearing appropriately futuristic. Lasers and explosions glow and dazzle as you race towards the end-of-stage warp, which looks to have been lifted right out of Stargate with its rippling plane-of-water effect. The music, too, is a pretty competent blend of electronica which reminded me of certain tracks in FreQuency (being on a half-pipe again may have jogged this reaction). You’re going to want to get a good look at those graphics early in the game, though: The latter half of pretty much every stage is an exercise in trying to see what the hell is going on. Inevitably, as you near every single warp gate, enemies and powerups will begin to litter the stage as the track curves left and right, making it near-impossible to line up shots and collect energy, assaulting your senses with a mish-mash of colorful effects until the stage finally concludes, and you’re left to reflect upon a hollow success you couldn’t even see, let alone alter in any way. The bonus stages are somehow even worse, despite only being populated by a few energy balls and no shooting. The track on the bonus stage curves and flails and jerks around with such alarming frequency that the powerups are impossible to follow. It’s like trying to line up a shot of billiards while someone has lifted the table over his head and is shaking it around.
Don’t worry about the schizophrenic graphics affecting your record, however: Gyrostarr is a pitifully easy game. I feel obligated to issue a disclaimer here: My game ended after completing 20 of Gyrostarr’s 50 levels. Not because the game had finally bested me, but because after playing for 90 minutes through levels which all looked and played exactly the same, I decided to see what would happen if I lost. I set the controller down and left the game on auto-pilot, and I still managed to amass half the energy needed to pass the stage when it ended, and I decided to take a break. Again, I have no way of legitimately knowing that the game doesn’t finally get challenging after the first 21 stages, but I can’t honestly recommend to you a game where you have to sleepwalk through the entire first half in pursuit of an engaging coda.
The gameplay behind Gyrostarr isn’t inherently bad — in spots, it’s actually quite creative. This is really a shame, when you experience these little bursts of inspiration, because with some better design choices, they show what a unique shooter Gyrostarr could have been. The most unique gameplay element in Gyrostarr is that your own shots are actually a double-edged sword: Yes, they will destroy baddies and thus earn you points, but they will also knock power-ups and vital energy balls away from you. If you knock them too far down the track, in fact, you destroy them completely, thus penalizing you for firing constantly and haphazardly. With your livelihood dependent on flying through the stage’s energy balls, there is actually a significant challenge in trying to dodge enemy fire while patiently waiting for the energy to reach your ship; every shot which accidentally knocks the energy away from you only prolongs the ordeal. At times, this can even become unfair, as enemies inevitably line up with the incoming energy, thus ensuring you will either have to blast the energy away in the melee, or else suffer their unchecked wrath.
How is this unfairness solved? Through the addition of the grappling hook, which single-handedly reverses the difficulty from “unfair” to “pathetic.” A tap of the control pad will send a grappling hook streaking down the track from your ship, passing through any enemies or lasers, until it reaches an energy ball or powerup, which it will promptly reel back to you. And, since there is no penalty or possible negative impact for its use, a player has no reason not to simply hammer on the button for the length of the entire stage. With zero effort, a player will find himself availed of any and all necessary powerups, and enough energy to fill the entire gauge before the stage is even a third complete. The one conceivable disadvantage to the grappling hook is that it can take a while to return if you happen to miss your intended target. Not to worry, though — it also snags goodies on its way back.
Largely the same thing can be said for the game’s multiplayer experience: A very inventive idea that falls short due to poor design and erratic gameplay. Gyrostarr multiplayer, you see, is both cooperative and competitive; energy collected by any player is added to the total needed for all players to survive, but at the same time, everybody is competing for points by killing the most enemies and snagging more energy than everyone else. Simultaneously, the ability to drive away powerups and energy with your shots can now be used as a competitive edge, depriving your fellow Gyrostarr-ers of extra points. Finally, there is a unique strategic element added to the multiplayer game: the line-up. When two to four players are in the game, while they can still move freely from left to right, they are set in fixed positions from front to back along the track. The player in front, while being a prime target for enemy fire, is also in a prime location to snag his choice of powerups and energy. Once a player actually picks up a goodie, he is shuffled down the line, thus providing a tricky strategy to the game — do you grab the powerups as fast as you can, or do you wait for the really good one to show up before you snag it?
How is this all rendered completely moot and pointless? The grappling hook. Yes, it’s here too, and yes, there’s still no reason not to be constantly spamming it, no matter what position you hold in line. Hell, if anything, it makes even more sense to do this in multiplayer, as grappling a powerup will keep you further back in line, thus protecting you from enemies. A typical multiplayer game of Gyrostarr is basically a neverending stream of grappling hooks flying about the track, with powerups and energy seeming to be awarded to the players at random. At the end of the stage, players can compare their meaningless scores, along with a few bonus awards for things like “Unstoppable” or the confusing “Most Shots Killed.” Yeah… take that, you shots. In addition, Gyrostarr claims to increase the difficulty proportionately based on the number of players. If by “difficulty” you mean “so much random crap that you can’t keep track of it near the end of every stage,” then yes, it certainly does that.
Gyrostarr’s potential for a deep experience is there, but a handful of bad choices have relegated it to a shallow, forgettable blast-a-thon. It has needlessly schlepped its SCUBA gear to the wading pool. As such, I was prepared to just say “pass,” but I’m afraid I can’t do that — not without mentioning two glaring flaws which it is my obligation to warn you about. Firstly, Gyrostarr’s press release claims the following:
Gyrostarr’s controls were built from the ground up to utilize the motion-sensing capabilities of the Wii™.
THIS IS AN OUTRIGHT FABRICATION. Do not believe this; it is a lie. Either these are the most blatantly tacked-on motion controls I’ve ever played with, or the designer behind this “ground up” decision has never worked with motion controls before, ever. See, the only controls in Gyrostarr are moving left and right, and this is achieved, motion-wise, by tilting the Wiimote left and right. We’ve seen it done a hundred times before, right? Right, we have — but we don’t see it here. The controls do not, as one might expect, allow you to tilt your way to finesse and accurate control. The ship does not move farther or faster, the more you tilt. Instead, you experience the same, non-analog control you would get with the d-pad, except now in tilt form. Tilt past a certain threshold, and the ship is instantly at full speed. Tilt just slightly back under that threshold for a full stop. If you were inclined, you could hold the Wiimote just under the needed angle, and play “move/don’t move” with infinitesimal movements. This is not “motion-sensing,” High Voltage. This is “How do we map D-pad controls to something that looks future-y?” If this is all you could manage “from the ground up,” you are working with the wrong console.
Secondly, you may be prepared to dismiss my review as having jumped unfairly to conclusions, given that I never mentioned having gone back and played more levels after the initial 21 that I sampled. Well, that’s a fair point. Don’t I have an obligation to try the game in its entirety? Here’s the thing: After taking a break after 21 levels, I was poking around other elements of the game — exploring the multiplayer, sampling the different control schemes, et cetera. I noted that, when starting up a new game, I was now presented with an option to start anywhere from level 1 to 21. In addition, the game had created a data file for itself and had warned me about auto-saving. So, naturally, I’d be able to come back later and jump back in from level 21 and play through the rest. Or so I thought, until I actually shut down the Wii and went to work on something else for a moment. When I returned and fired Gyrostarr back up, my achieved levels were gone. Interestingly enough, so was my high score. I checked in the Wii system memory — the Gyrostarr save data was still there. But, somehow, I had nothing to show for it. The game, once shut off, does not save your level, and doesn’t even save your score; arguably, the main thing one would use to track one’s progress as a player.
What the hell are you actually saving, Gyrostarr? You’ve got a save file! What the hell is in that file?!
Don’t buy this one.
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