Legendary videogame musician Yuzo Koshiro, who worked on the original ActRaiser, composed SolSeraph’s opening themeUp among the clouds, Helios is
essentially a winged cursor for picking
and placing structures. But he’s also
got a few tricks up his armoured
sleeves. He can make it rain, helping
the village’s crops grow, or drop a
lightning bolt to smite foes. Helios,
it turns out, is an interventionist
god, and this comes much closer to
fulfilling the game’s central fantasy.
Half the battle
The skirmishes themselves feel a
little inconsequential. The people
you’re protecting are fairly disposable,
each house you’ve built is able
to repopulate any fallen soldiers
instantly – it’s better if you don’t
consider what’s going on inside those
four walls. But the overall rhythm is
compelling: beat a wave, build up
more defences as a timer ticks down
to the next onslaught, beat another
wave, and eventually push outwards
towards the enemy bases and place a
temple there. This lets you drop back
into the ground game, giving you a
screen full of monsters to clear.
Winning the fight will capture that
point. It doesn’t stop the flow of
baddies, strangely, but it chips away
at the influence of whichever god
is tormenting this particular area.
Beat every base and you’ll be able
to face them directly in a boss fight,
overthrowing them completely.
Farewell Queen Of Bones, Mother Of
Thirst, Troubler Of The Desert Peoples.
So long, King Of Trees, He That Eats
Of The Earth, Generally Kind Of A Pain
In The Backside.
Each time you beat up one of these
younger gods, you’ll unlock a new
godly power to be deployed in the
side-scrolling sections, switching
out your basic arrows for flame or
thunder. But this is about the extent
of interaction between the two halves.
Other games, like Firaxis’ XCOM titles,
use this double-layer structure sothat each section constantly hands
you new tools to deploy in the other.
Here, the platformer doesn’t do much
to enrich the tower defence game, or
vice versa. Which leaves each half to
stand on their own – and honestly,
there are better examples of either
genre to be found on Xbox. It’s a
tragedy, but SolSeraph certainly won’t
be going down in history. QLIVING
LEGEND
This isn’t the first time
that ACE Team has
tackled the art of
antiquity. The bonkers
Rock Of Ages took
your smiling boulder
on a tour of art history
starting in ancient
Greece. But where
that game grabbed
the era’s pottery
painting and
sculpture, SolSeraph
takes a much plainer
approach, with the
platforming sections
borrowing more visual
inspiration from
classic Sega than art.
Levels and enemy
designs sit
somewhere between
Sonic and Altered
Beast, with
occasional splashes
of the developer’s
trademark weirdness.“The platformer
doesn’t do
much to enrich
the tower
defence game”
FAR LEFT The
side-scrolling
sections are
pretty
simplistic.
RIGHT Instead of
the original’s
pixel art, you
have to make do
with 3D models.OXM VERDICT
A belated hit-and-
myth successor to
a SNES cult classic
that doesn’t quite
hit its mark.5
LEFT A spot of
divine
intervention
would be useful
against this
giant beetle.More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 079REVIEW