Super Star Soldier

~ SUPER STAR SOLDIER ~

Hudson Soft / NEC

HuCard

1991

I know that a lot of people like this game, but I've never been a big fan of it. I think it's ugly, sloppy, unoriginal, and clearly inferior to other Turbo space verts like Soldier Blade, Blazing Lazers, and Nexzr. Let's take a level by level look at this "classic space journey":

Stage 1 - Generic opening space stage. The music here is the best to be found in the game, though it's not as good as Soldier Blade's first-stage tune or practically anything from BL's soundtrack.

Stage 2 - I've seen this level in way too many other verts. Tanks patrol the green landscape that you travel over before you reach a coastal base and then the sea, where the usual floating hunk of metal awaits you.

Stage 3 - Extremely ugly desert stage. The popular scorpion boss looks cool, though he's easy to defeat.

Stage 4 - Generic space stage with an orange circle in the backdrop. Wonderful. The huge robot at the end would be just another bum in Soldier Blade, but he's one of the highlights here.

Stage 5 - Another stage straight from a million other shooters. Shoot the chunks of ice and watch them break into smaller parts. Serpents slink around in the meantime. The action isn't too terrible here. The "monster that blows up and becomes a snake" boss is lame.

Stage 6 - This one reminds me a lot of Blazing Lazers, with the fast scrolling and multitudes of small foes to fend off. Decent stage with good action.

Stage 7 - Possibly the best level of the game. Launching an attack on a large battleship is nothing new, but the inside of this vessel looks pretty cool, and the speed run at the end is enjoyable enough. The meek spider duo that assaults you should've been left out.

Stage 8 - Ah, the old boss gauntlet. Sadly, you have to fight through a seemingly endless stretch of minor riffraff before you reach it. I can't complain much about the final battle, though.

Stages 5-7 represent the best stretch of action that the game has to offer, but there's nothing here to match the intensity of BL's toughest levels, nothing that calls for strategy like Nexzr's tightest sequences, and very few of the bosses can compete with Soldier Blade's multi-attack giants. The music isn't very good, and the graphics are quite bad; and there really aren't enough neat or original concepts to make up for the lackluster superficials. The best things I can say about SSS are that it plays well enough to be mediocre rather than disastrous and it offers a reasonably high level of challenge.