The Red Star is an odd one to get into , it's one of the best gems the Playstation 2 had to offer but yet it's legacy is unknown to a lot of people; The game was the fruit of an obscure independent comic run that began in 1999 about a futuristic Soviet Russia plentiful of giant war machines and high-tech weaponry. The jump to video games was first picked up by Acclaim with a release due for 2004 and in the advent of the company bankruptcy the game disappeared into vaporware for the two years that followed. Xs Game then carried on the development in order to finish the game and it finally got released in 2007.

The Red Star had everything to go against it; the game was released at a weird timing since the PS3 was already out almost a year before it shipped. The fact that it was also a pretty dated concept in terms of graphics and being published by an unrecognized publisher it might have turned off a lot of gamers and as a matter of fact if it wasn’t for the dedication of some of its fans to spread its greatness, a lot of us might not even have heard of it.



Is there any appeal for The Red Star’s narrative or anything of its storyline to keep players asking for more? Absolutely not, the game has a very weak and stale way to tell its story using mission briefings and a short introduction when you load up the game. Resuming The Red Star’s story without having any prior notions of the graphic novels plot is like trying to remember the story of a porno flick. Even if it’s loosely based on the comics, you are ultimately going to beat shit up (>_> saw the pun after I wrote it..) and make your way to the final boss who is the bad guy. Which is inherently not a bad thing at all since the game is all about old school action.

The Red Star achieves what many games of the same genre have failed to do before in merging two distinctive types of games that forged the glory days of the arcades. The game plays like a standard beat’em up with the ability to use both melee and range weapons like any modern hack’n’slashs and in addition will turn into a shmup (arcade shooter) for its boss fights. The blend is actually very well performed because the separation between random grunts and bosses are cut in between each other. Some of the encounters require the good old bullet curtain dodging while others use both vertical and horizontal shooting patterns. Of course most of these bosses have obvious glowing weak points in order for you to damage them and they are pretty straight forward in that matter.



The layout for the characters reminded me a lot of Streets of Rage or Final Fight because they are paired to traits like speed, strength or magic and use different attack patterns depending on that. While all these mechanics are great in perspective there is however a great flaw to the melee combat of some of the characters.

The combos in the game are really simple to input however when you are performing one there is no way for the player to cancel it which means that a lot of times, you will get hit without having the power to stop it. It’s very annoying especially when your primary goal is to save up most of your health for the eclectic boss fights. Range attacks may become overpowered depending on how you build up your character abilities however it's not that big of a problem since you kind of want to have the upper hand over your enemies.



There are quite a lot of upgrades you can use in the game to tweak your character to your combat style like regenerative strikes, higher damage inputs, higher shields and combo meters; the game keeps it simple and recycles its ideas from older archetypes. The Red Star is surprisingly lengthy with 19 chapters to go throughout and has a decent amount of unlocks like the “Smash TV” arena based challenges and the many unlockables cheats and a third playable character. The game is boasted with a great 2 player coop mode and with its challenging bosses, replayability is very high.

It’s a great shame that this game went under the radar in such a short lifespan but this is definitely a great title to add to any Shmup or Beat’em up fan collection. The Red Star is kinda hard to find nowadays in stores however the price is very reasonable , more or less you’ll pay 10$ for it in retail and if you really want to it’s also available on PSP as a downloadable title and on the Iphone later on this spring.

The Red Star is a great game worthy of your time and that will sharpen your old school skills which is greatly rewarding!

----
7.9 (Although not entirely perfect, games like these reinvigorate Kraid’s faith that old school gaming still has its place in our era)
---

and since I've been talking about Cold War matters all this time , here's Nena with 99 Luftballons ...clever but not quite.