Shin Super Robot Taisen (Neo Super Robot War)

SHIN SUPER ROBOT TAISEN
(NEO SUPER ROBOT WAR)
Sony Playstation
1 Player / Strategy
Banpresto
SLPS 00550
¥6800

— by Dave Van Cleef

Banpresto's SHIN SUPER ROBOT TAISEN (official English title NEO SUPER ROBOT WAR) is the seventh in the line of SUPER ROBOT games and the first to be designed for a next-generation platform.

The game opens with a full motion video sequence of the arrival of a new enemy, a mysterious alien force, and their attack on an O'Neill space colony. This new enemy appears not to have a relation to the Divine Crusaders, a break with tradition.

The storyline is typical SRT — hero pilots of the legendary mecha shows of the '70s, '80s and '90s join forces to defeat a great menace to the world. The full game will run 35 stages, each taking roughly an hour to complete. There are two main paths through the game, and you must choose whether to venture into space or remain on earth during the seventh common stage. After completing both routes, you will have an opportunity to play the endgame, a three stage final scenario using all the pilots and units from both stages.

Visuals are not much different from the SRT4S engine, although the graphics have been bumped up a notch or two, particularly in the super attacks, such as Shin Getta Robo's Shin Shine Spark, Mazinger Z's Breast Fire, and the like. Also notable is the voice selection — every pilot now has vocal soundbites, even the flunkies. Unfortunately this means that several series were not included for lack of voice-actor availability, such as Dunbine and Grandizer, although we have the SRT debut of SPT Layzner and Gaiking to partly make up for it. Also the robot designs have changed, eliminating the SD graphics in favor of a more realistic appearance.

Unfortunately gameplay is where SHIN SUPER ROBOT TAISEN really is at its weakest. The game is fairly short, with only 35 stages on each path and only a handful of those will take a decent player much longer than an hour to complete. Most are much shorter. The difficulty level is also not very high. Many of the SRT4S stages took several attempts to complete in order to figure out the strategy required. This reviewer only had to retry a stage once while running through the space route (the more difficult of the two), and that was only due to neglecting to read the mission objective screen.

Overall this game, while much more viscerally appealing, is not as much fun to play as the previous effort. This reviewer would look forward to seeing another SRT with the game engine of SSRT but the more thoughtful and balanced scenario design of SRT4S. Sadly this brings up another point — with the impending merger of Sega and Bandai it is not clear if this might be the last of the SRT series available for Playstation. We can only watch and wait at this time.

Rating: **1/2
(*** for SRT and Strategy Game Fan)