Nanostray 2

If the original Nanostray left you floating in deep space with its tacked-on touch controls, absentee story and unlimited continues, Shin'en has heard your distress call. Nanostray 2 corrects all of these problems while maintaining the gorgeous production values we've come to expect from the original DS game and Iridion GBA titles.

You may remember Nanostray being light (read: barren) on plot, and so to correct this the developers wrote in a simple narrative that charges the player with blasting through the galaxy in search of a cure for the Nanostray virus. To prevent the contagion from wiping out all life, you'll need to scour eight planets and solar-systems for "patient zero," the virus' origin. This standard objective won't win any Nebula Awards, but it does the job of moving the game forward with some sense of purpose.

What Nanostray fans won't find are the much-maligned touch controls, which Shin'en rightly decided to deep-six. The D-pad controls your ship's movement, while the A and B buttons pull main and secondary weapons duty. The L and R buttons shift the position of satellites, floating Gradius -like orbs that supplement your main blasters. The touch controls do make a cameo, however, as alternate control settings, but we'd steer clear, anyway. Secondary weapons including Seeker missiles, Pulse beams, electrical discharges, triggered bombs, spin bolts and shock mines are chosen before each mission instead of toggled dynamically as in the original, or snagged via random power-ups during gameplay in other schmups like Aegis Wing or Einhander.

Supplementing the new story and controls are typically astronomical production values: The menus and cutscenes are superb; backgrounds, whether lushly organic, dustbowl craters or cold desolate space, contain stunning detail; the 3D game sprites zip and spin fluidly and the techno-infused soundtrack adds a sense of urgency to the already twitchy gameplay. Sadly, though, some of the slowdown issues persist, but they're by no means severe. Simply put, Shin'en knows how an arcade shooter should look and feel.

Unfortunately, for all the graphical polish, level design remains dry and uninspired. While we do give Shin'en points for integrating both vertical and horizontal scrolling, each level is basically a five-minute Death Star run punctuated by one mini-boss and one end boss, which becomes increasingly predictable. Thankfully, though, the ramped up difficulty keeps the game from growing stale too fast since unlimited continues have been vaporized. Also gone are the cheapskate difficulty levels which simply curtailed ships and continues for each setting. Nanostray 2 now employs real difficulty settings that impact gameplay, i.e. scrolling speeds increase and enemies' fire off more rounds and at a faster rate. In addition to the increased difficulty settings you'll also get a fair amount of replay value from challenges and unlockable simulators, essentially objective-based mini-games aimed at survival or hi-score hunting. Again, the level design won't raise any eyebrows but the nigh-impossible difficulty will definitely keep you locked on.

After you've wore out your copy with the arcade mode, challenges and simulators, you can still tear it up with friends via multiplayer and an online component. You can challenge a friend in hi-score or survival mode with a single cart, or engage in more robust duel and coop modes using the multi-card mode. Nanostray 2 also utilizes the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection to access a worldwide leader board where players can upload their high-scores from arcade mode; and really hardcore schmup players are all about bragging rights, so this is a welcome carry over from the original.

Nanostray 2 sets right the problem of many first-gen DS games, namely tacked on controls, but it also homes in on its core demographic-- hardcore shooter fans. And really, there isn't a whole lot you can do with the schmup besides make it exponentially harder, which Nanostray 2 does in spades. The title will definitely please hardcore arcade shooter fans, but the increased difficulty may narrow the game's mainstream appeal. And we're fine with that, especially in an age where the casual gamer rules the galaxy.

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