Gleylancer for MD

Image: MobyGames

Gleylancer

Lady levenge

Genre: shooter - horizontal

Publisher: Masaya

Year: 1992

System: MD

Gameplay Score: 4

Gameplay Notes:

Great movement with 4 levels of adjustable speed. The main gimmick is a set of two invincible options which sit above an below your ship. Before the game you can select how those options work. They can either point in the direction you face, the opposite direction, auto-aim, or several other options that are so confusing I didn't bother trying to make sense of them. Auto-aim is by far the best. In fact the only reason I can think of for using anything else is to increase the difficulty. And that's a valid reason because this is one of the easiest shooters I've ever played. You can sit there doing nothing for about 80% of the time. Tons of weapon types, though they are basically just reskins of one another.

Level Design Score: 4

Level Design Notes:

Pretty standard stuff. Nothing that surprised or delighted me. Bosses are a highlight but go down quickly. Enemies tend to spawn in from all angles to play to the gimmick of your multi-directional option fire. This can greatly alter the game's difficulty depending on which firing scheme you selected. With auto-aim/seeker on those enemies are melted more or less immediately, but with anything else you'll be constantly micromanaging your direction of fire.

Theme Score: 4

Theme Notes:

A long opening cutscene tells the story of a battleship commander and crew being captured by aliens and his teenage daughter hijacking an experimental fighter to take on the enemies alone. It's a nice reversal of the standard damsel in distress trope. Not that it matters for a space shooter.

Art Style Score: 4

Art Style Notes:

I wanted to give this a 5 but I couldn't quite go there. It looks great, including excellent sprites and gorgeous parallax, including in the foreground layers, but the color palette is too dark and brown to stand out. Again, looks great, but not quite Thunder Force IV levels of awesome.

Audio Score: 4

Audio Notes:

Great music sets the stage. Not top-tier, but good stuff all the same. Unobtrusive sound effects round out the package.

Overall Score: 80

Review ID: 6026