A horizontal shooter published by EastAsiaSoft for $9.99, Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer is a shmup with a serious name.
When it comes to the threat of human extinction by aliens attacking, why does the fate of the world always come down to a lone rogue mercenary? Why isn’t there a team of highly skilled warriors ready to accept this task, one that has been prepping their entire life for this? This is like NASA saying, yeah, there is this dude who drives a mean garbage truck in Ohio… we are going to send him into space to deal with this horrible, life-ending threat.
Besides the stereotypical, ridiculous narrative that makes zero sense, this shooter’s gameplay is almost as complex as its long and confusing name. While players can simply auto-fly to the right and hold the fire button to shoot a constant string of bullets, there is an overly complicated combo system in place. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t do a good job of explaining how this firing system works. There is a pop-up with some text, but it is easily missable because it is mapped to the same button as the fire attack. Meaning, there is a good chance you will accidentally overlook this one screen of important text because you most likely will be holding by the shoot button which also closes the dialog box.
Even if you do figure out the weapon combo system, it doesn’t mean much because the game is still overly difficult. Sure, you can probably fly through the first stage without too much issue, but stage 2 will smack you right in the face. This is also one of those games where you take damage if you bump into the parts of the environment. Sometimes the stage design requires the player to move through a maze while the screen is constantly moving forward. So it is rough and requires near perfection if you want even the slightest chance to survive. Practice and memorization are required to make any significant progress.
The other problem with this shmup is simply the presentation of the gameplay. The playable craft is a small, thin ship that shoots even thinner bullets. Most enemy ships are also thin in their design. So nailing enemies is sort of like trying to thread moving needles. This compounds the combo weapon system because hitting targets isn’t easy, especially in any consistent order.
Making matters worse, the few power-ups or score enhancing pick-ups are very small and can easily be confused with enemy fire. The power-ups don’t necessarily make the game any easier; adding one additional, temporary machine gun at a downward 45-degree angle is great but won’t make a huge difference when the screen is totally filled with tiny enemies and their small bullets.
There are multiple difficulty settings, which is a welcomed feature, but only pros will be able to clear the normal difficulty. With only a few stages, it might sound like a short game on paper, but chances are you won’t even see the second half due to the steep difficulty. At the time of this review, I managed to score to the highest rank on the online leaderboard pre-public release. Point being, I couldn’t make it beyond level 2 and I was the highest score so the other pre-access players had even more of an issue than I did. There is also no option to lower the volume, only turn it off completely so streamers beware (the default setting is loud).
I really wanted to like Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer more than I did but the overly complex combo system, weird narrative, and arbitrary difficulty hinders the gameplay instead of enhancing it.
By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com
X/Twitter: @ZackGaz
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RATING
OUR SCORE - 6
6
SCORE
Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer has gamplay combo system just as head scratching as it is to pronounce its needlessly complex name.