Thankfully,
RayCrisis has much tighter gameplay than its predecessor, and as such is a more enjoyable game. Taking a cue from
Radiant Silvergun (the best damn shooter,
ever),
RayCrisis has you zooming through absolute fields of bullets and escaping unscathed... if you’re good.
There are two play modes. In Original Mode, you pick three different levels to play (and you can pick them in any order). There are more than three “levels” to choose from, so each time you play through Original Mode, it can be different. There’s also a short introduction piece that you always shoot through. This is a port of the arcade game, and as such, you get infinite continues. This means you can beat this version the first time you play it, although you’ll probably have to use lots and lots of continues to do so.
Then there’s Special Mode. In Special Mode, you always go through the levels the same way, and you have no continues. But many enemies drop one-ups, and the levels themselves are a little altered (a few are more detailed; others have different palettes for some of the bosses). This one’s damned tough to beat, if only because the last two bosses have some attacks that are well-nigh impossible to dodge consistently.
That’s not a fault of the control scheme, though, which is important enough in a twitch shooter to affect the gameplay seriously. You can use the analog stick, and although you have a little of the “drift” that was in RayStorm, the game seems to be more forgiving about hit detection as well. I can wend my way through a volley of bullets with (general) ease, and although the controls take a bit of getting use to, they’re easy once you know what you’re doing.
Unlike shooters that rely on lots of spiffy weapon power-ups, the Ray series has ships with two different types of attacks -- main and lock-on. The main attack is what you expect from any shooter -- lots of bullets/strong laser/whatever. The lock-on, however, is the real measure of skill in RayCrisis. The beginner’s ship can only lock on eight times, but the later ships can lock on up to 256 times (24 at a time), making for a serious volley of bullets. Perfection of the lock-on skills is necessary to keep a high score.
RayCrisis also has the requisite instant-death weapon, the Round Divider, which wipes out pretty much everything on the screen. It has something interesting called Encroachment, which basically shows how many of the enemies you’ve killed. If you don’t kill most of them, the levels are shorter and you don’t get as many opportunities to score. And the bosses are tough as nails, requiring you to get difficult patterns down quick... or die.
