A little over a month ago, one of the most visually spectacular shoot em up among those who keep the genre alive came back with a good dose of refinements, making the leap to the star figures of the moment: 4k and 60 frames per second . Great visual aspect of Sine Mora EX , fantastic modern representative of the games of Martians, but the genre invariably needed
many more elements to surprise the player, even though the visual surprises always played their role in any success or failure . Aware that the most important thing in a video game is not seen in screenshots or trailers, Locomalito returns to the stages in which
his art, the sublimation of retro, can reach more potential followers. The legendary freeware developer capable of performing videogames on his ow
n level more than many commercial projects returns to Steam and Xbox One with Super Hydorah , the embodiment of his old childhood dream, as the author himself has indicated on more than one occasion and the game reminds us.
Super Hydorah is the answer to a very specific question , although it adorns its language with many beautiful words: what would have happened if one of the best shoot em up of the mid-nineties had never hit the market?. Imagine that such a thing had happened and now, in the middle of 2017, someone would have stumbled upon the typical forg
otten cabinet with a dusty recreational plaque. Let us suppose that its circuits were still operative, and that after putting it into operation we disco
vered that in it resides a game made in the old style that nobody came to play . To complete the function, we will imagine that in a short time we would discover that the forgotten game is superior to almost everything realized until it is forgotten i
n that drawer , prey to the fall from grace of the genre. This is what Super Hydorah proposes: a radical return to the past of shoot em upin which we appreciate a solid and varied representation of the best virtues of these games. It requires your proposal, m
ake it clear who is going to give you an opportunity, dedication, complicity and knowledge of the arcade world . Therefore, its virtues (which are not few) will only be admired by those who are willing to devote many hours to a small downloadable indie.
A radical return to the past
There is much to celebrate visually in Super Hydorah. The game was already very colorful in 2010, when it was released as a free proje
ct, but the additional work carried out in this new version has transformed it into something much more solvent. It stops, and this is worthy of praise, in an aspect that we sometimes miss in the indie scene: a CRT filte
ring of great quality that enhances the homage to the old arcade monitors , increasing the loyalty to the many games in which is based. In previous works of Locomalito it was easier to locate the visual references, but Super Hydora
h seems to borrow from many sources in this sense. It’s based on 16-bit arcades, of course, but many effects and scenarios will give us the feeling of coming from more advanced games, like Gradius Gaiden for the first Playstation or the episodes of the same saga for Game Boy Advance, if ever they would have made the leap to a big screen. It is clear that
we are talking about graphics inspired by the 16-32 Bits, but everything is done with great taste and the result is an objective that is not always achieved lately: that we believe that we are facing a great game of that time , without any additive that distracts us from the temporary jump.
Even so, as it happened with the Sine Mora Ex with which we opened this review, we should not distract ourselves admiring the beauty of the scenarios. The arcade games were pure instant gameplay with varying levels of depth, and Super Hydo
rah can not and does not want to give up on this premise, but rather embraces it to its ultimate consequences. It is quite clear after a few minutes of play that the great inspiration of the title is that of the Gradius saga, from which it could well go through one
of its best episodes without polygons, and those who are familiar with the adventures of the Vic Viper ship will recognize many elements of those first deliveries. Even so, Super Hydorah begins to show his most personal letters wit
ha system of power ups similar but not the same, that feels new even if it shares bases with the saga of Konami . We can go up power a primary weapon and a secondary, although the choice of weapons (completely crucial in the most complicated scenarios), we perform before each of the levels-planet. In addition to setting up each level of weapons, we m
ust choose different routes , and at the end of each challenge, we unlock new weapon possibilities. This is the key, since all the above leads to Super Hydorah is anything but a linear game , and it lies its greatest success. We can choose the
routes we know best to overcome them with the weapons that best suit our game, although many levels claim a specific equipment to not become a real hell. It is not something completely new, since nothing comes to be completely in this video game, but no less true is that everything borrowed works perfectly, to the point of overcoming not a few of their models.
