A retro-style vertical shooter with several days of content.
One of the most important characteristics of an arcade-style horizontal or vertical shooter is the appeal that makes you want to pick it up again and again. Sophstar really shines with its large number of playable ships, bonus challenges, and unlockables. Ultimately, though, it feels good to play and offers something new every time it launches.
Publishing by Red Art Games, Sophstar follows the heroine Soph and a seemingly harmless reconnaissance mission, followed by many more changes. A story interstitial between each of the eight stages reveals Sof’s background and what’s happening in the galaxy. The ending will vary depending on which difficulty you choose, but what stands out here is solid gameplay and variety of content.
Arcade mode has 6 difficulty options, a training mode, and 2 score settings to choose from. The seven stages are not very long and usually include at least one mini-boss and final boss. Stage 8 is effectively just a boss fight, and while the enemy’s design isn’t all that special, the fact that he has nine unique ships to pilot more than makes up for it. Each has different main cannons, sub-weapons, teleport capabilities, and can be flashed, shifted, and repositioned. Sub-weapons are very different from each other and rely on meters that recharge slowly over time. They include screen-cleaning bombs, focused laser beams, and even rotating shields that can fire forward. And in some cases, you can hook items that rotate between point values and subweapon meter charges. Teleportation also has a cooldown between uses.
Several additional modes complement the standard arcade playthrough. Cadet School features a total of 60 challenge stages, each with objectives such as surviving as long as possible, earning a certain number of points, or defeating enemies as quickly as possible. All of these challenges award character rankings based on your performance and unlock visual filters for the game. Score Attack, Timed, Challenge, Endless modes, and the unlockable Ultimate Challenge add even more content to put your shooter mettle to the test. All modes (except Cadet School) have their own online leaderboards.
In addition to the aforementioned filters you can unlock (there are over 20 so far), different screen borders and even tate modes give you more ways to tailor the visual experience to your liking. Key game options let you view hitboxes, adjust the appearance of the teleport gauge, and pulse enemy bullets. My favorite was the sound test mode. This is because the music is pretty catchy and the more you play, the more you like it.
Sophstar surpasses some of Switch’s other arcade shooters with its sheer amount of content and replayability. Going through arcade mode on different difficulty levels and using new ships is a real treat as each one feels different than the previous one. It’s a bit annoying that the sleep mode periodically seems to disconnect the game from the online server and force you to manually reconnect in the menu, but there’s little to criticize about the game. Sophstar is a stellar debut from developer Banana Bytes and a title that fans of vertical shooters can easily recommend and return to regularly.
