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Overview
A conversion of Taito's multi-screen arcade shoot 'em up, Darius Plus features a choice of paths through the game after defeating each giant aquatic-style boss. Gameplay is fairly traditional with power-ups increasing the damage of your forward shots and bombs.
Comment
Darius Plus is a nice, but drawn out, horizontally scrolling shoot ‘em up. Darius has always had a style of it’s own and that is much of where its appeal lays. The bosses are very original and have some quite impressive detail and the levels are generally attractive, if repetitive. The only trouble with the Darius games is that once you lose your weapons, you may as well kiss your whole game goodbye as it can be very difficult to recover. So one for the die hard shoot ‘em up fans only. A special note should go to the music which is unusual and a bit of an acquired taste, but great.
sunteam_paul
You say...
Darius was first introduced to us via a novel three-screen arcade cabinet, automatically making any home conversion slightly underwhelming in comparison. But behind the novelty of the triple CRT cab, Darius also offered up some other interesting tidbits. First of all, even though it's a space shooter, beautiful robot fish spritework abounds throughout the series, becoming Darius's motif. Secondly, the game offers branching path levels, ensuring unprecedented replay value. The first level is static, but every level has a choice for the next.
Interestingly, Darius Plus is the first of 4 Darius games for the PC Engine, and yet despite being the first, is actually one of the better games. Super Darius is much the same sort of thing on a CD, Darius Alpha, famous for being the rarest and most expensive PC Engine game, is a boss-rush, and Super Darius II, is the same sort of thing again, but much zoomed in - which seems a strange choice, given the expansive screen real estate of the original. This version has some beautiful, colourful graphics, but maintains a slow (think R-type) pace, and the enemy patterns won't wow you. It's definitely worth a look if you like shooters, if only for the history. Also, the music I wanna say is a bit kind of spooky?
soop
Cheats/Tips
CONTINUE: On the title screen, push SELECT to continue from the last level played.
DIFFICULTY LEVEL: On the title screen, hold I+II and push SELECT to choose the difficulty level. |
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