From the Archives: Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype

From the Archives: Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype

Pew pew pew!

Limited Run Games catalog #013 couldn’t have been more different from its same-day sibling release, Lost Sea. Where that island-hopping adventure fell smack into the midst of gaming’s burgeoning new roguelite trend, Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype—which, like Lost Sea, was also published digitally by Eastasiasoft—is about as unabashedly old-school as they come. 

Final Prototype hearkens back to 8-bit side-scrolling shooters like Konami’s Gradius and Irem’s R-Type; you can even collect A.I.-controlled companion fighters to boost your attack power, similar to Gradius’ Options. For players who long for the score-chasing comfort of a pure test of twitch skill, Final Prototype offered a welcome break from quirky indie games and inventive genre mash-ups.

Which isn’t to say Final Prototype is a pure retro­gaming experience by any means. While it sticks closely to time-honored conventions and colors inside the lines of its genre, its old-school ethos doesn’t go as far as its visuals or music. Germany-based developer SideQuest Studios managed to coax both intense, screen-filling combat and silky-smooth 60fps animation out of the humble PlayStation Vita hardware. It’s a shiny, sleek-looking game, with fixed-perspective polygonal graphics that make Final Prototype look like nothing so much as a high-end take on 32-bit classics like Einhänder or G-Darius. The camera pans and swoops at key moments to create a sense of drama, heightening the excitement of entering a new area or facing a never-before-seen wave of enemy forces. This never happens in a way that gets in the way of the action or creates complications for the player; it simply looks cool.

That’s not the only way in which Final Prototype does as much to pay homage to the 32-bit era of shooters as it does the older generations. The enemy fleet and its attacks alternate between 8-bit-style formation lines of tiny fighter craft, mid-sized carrier craft that call to mind 16-bit classics, and explosive, latter-day danmaku curtains of plasma that fill the screen and challenge the player to weave between projectiles. Final Prototype rarely relies on one style of gameplay too long, forcing players to remain alert and switch up their strategies from moment to moment as the enemy ranks update their own tactics.

And then, of course, each stage culminates in a showdown with a massive boss. These vary in form, appearing as anything from massive war cruisers to what seems to be industrial mining machinery, but they all have the ability to soak up tons of damage as they shift between different phases and improvise new attack strategies. Frequently their pilots will attempt to taunt the player over a radio broadcast, but this works both ways: Your home base support team will also broadcast tactical information and offer combat advice to help boost your chances of victory.

In short, Söldner-X 2 plays like an homage to three decades’ worth of timeless shooters. And while it doesn’t really offer any brilliant new ideas to put it in the same class of genre-defining works as the best Cave or Hudson shooters from bygone days, it’s a fine pastiche of the greats. And it’s no mere rehash; Final Prototype operates under its own particular set of rules and mechanics to make sure that it never feels like a carbon copy of someone else’s shooter. It’s merely a game whose creators took lots of notes along the way.

As with most classic-style shooters, Söldner-X 2 can be challenging to complete on any but the lowest difficulty setting, yet completing the game isn’t the point. Even if you can power through the enemy hordes at the highest difficulty level, it’s all for nothing if you don’t pay attention to your score. Your objective in Final Prototype is not merely to carve a laser path through waves of fodder and destroy the enemy’s leadership in order to see the credits roll but rather to get there in style. Your performance in each stage is rated on a letter scale that dips all the way down into the F of failure. Simply muddling through the action to the end will rarely net you anything better than an E rating—maybe D if you’re lucky—even if you manage not to lose a single life along the way.

No, to truly master Söldner-X 2, you need to take down the enemy elegantly. You need to make use of chain combination effects and never let your combo timer run down. You need to fight efficiently but know when not to use the best weapon for the job in order to keep the chain count up. You need to hunt down hidden items or perform secret tasks in order to reveal special bonus opportunities. You need to become an expert in the game—and play like an expert.

At the heart of Söldner-X 2’s scoring mechanic is a chaining system that ties in to the game’s central weapon system. Your fighter craft comes equipped with three different weapons. These can be traded for alternate weapons dropped by enemies, but you can also use the Vita’s shoulder triggers to swap between them. The available gun options include standard forward fire, a wide dispersal beam, a high-powered wave cannon, and more. Each weapon type comes in handy against different enemies and formations, but it’s not always best to swap between guns in favor of tactical superiority, since switching causes your chain multiplier to drop. The multiplier, of course, boosts the number of points you earn for gunning down bad guys—which means you constantly need to balance your load out between maximum firepower and maximum points. The two aren’t always necessarily the same.

On top of that, Söldner-X 2 throws in other considerations for you to bear in mind. For example, there are the secret keys: Each stage contains multiple hidden keys that can be collected by performing certain tasks—usually, but not always, destroying a specific enemy or formation—and collecting four or more keys in a single stage unlocks more of the game. You also have special screen-clearing bombs and boost attacks: The usual shoot-em-up niceties. Also worth noting is Berserker mode, a boost you activate automatically when your ship is in critical condition. Berserking boosts your damage output and reduces the damage you absorb, which means you might actually live long enough to recover some health and continue fighting—a great help when you find yourself in a pinch.

All in all, this is a refined, expanded new iteration on the mechanics and principles laid down in the original Söldner-X: Himmelstürmer, a PC game that SideQuest Studios created specifically as a classic shooter homage in 2007, where it stood out in the midst of the medium’s migration to high-definition consoles and gritty realism. While Söldner-X 2 feels less unconventional than its predecessor, that’s only because the original Söldner-X did so much to help normalize this approach to gaming. As a sequel, it carries forward many of the same classic principles and contemporary mechanics seen in the first game, with better graphics and more intricate workings. Eastasiasoft originally published Söldner-X 2 for PlayStation 3 in 2010, though Limited Run’s physical release on July 29, 2016 was strictly of the excellent Vita port.