So there’s some guy, and because of some overarching galactic war, he’s trying to protect some girl who’s not actually a girl and has a tail. So they shoot all the bad guys who want to kill them and … wait, who am I kidding? Nobody will pay this game’s story more than an iota of attention. You can find more insight by opening your browser, letting your cat walk over your keyboard a little and then adding ‘.blogspot.com’ to the end of whatever you get. You’ll ignore the story just like you’ll forgive the fact that some art-director over at Treasure was digging through a 10 000 Free Cursors website from ‘98 and thought it was a good idea to make the main menu cursor a lizard.<\/p>\n
You’ll forgive the game for its mediocre presentation, abominable story and vapid characters – the androgynous protagonist in particular seems to have been created simply to justify the recurring criticisms of Eastern storytelling – for one simple reason: It’s unremittingly fun. When you’ve successfully navigated your way across a highway spanning an immense trackless desert, fending off transforming robots that skate on the highway ahead of you while deflecting rockets fired from aircraft passing over, you’ll understand the appeal of the game. If that sounds like your kind of thing – and for any arcade lover, it is – you can just stop reading this review right here, add 10 to that final score, and go out and buy it.<\/p>\n
On paper, the game is a rail shooter. But if that conjures images of zombies trying to bite your face off, or an arcade cabinet with a cover pedal and a half-broken gun with a recoil action that either takes off your arm or does nothing more than emit a pathetic wheeze, then you’re already on the wrong track. <\/p>\n
Unless you’ve played the original Sin and Punishment, the sequel is unlike any game you’ve ever played. It’s more of an amalgam of a scrolling shooter and the 2D run-and-gun games you played at your arcades; more Radiant Silvergun or Gunstar Heroes than Dead Space: Extraction or Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles.<\/p>\n
In practise, the premise is quite simple. You point at stuff, shoot, and it dies. You can lock on to enemies to focus your fire on them, removing the need to aim so you can concentrate on not dying yourself. Your character can dodge, and is invincible while doing so. You also have a special world-ending attack that tends to kill pretty much everything you point it at, but takes a while to recharge. And in Sin and Punishment, ‘a while’ is defined as about 2 seconds, which is roughly the time it takes the game to fire 200 projectiles at you from 20 different directions. <\/p>\n
Sin and Punishment proves that Treasure are masters of two things: making games that are incredibly simple, yet endlessly entertaining; and making bullet-hell games that will wipe the floor with you and make you question why you ever thought you might actually be good at playing video-games. So you’ll be dodging, flying, reflecting and shooting (often all at the same time) your way through the game’s varying locales and you’ll be having an almost sinful degree of fun while doing it. Doesn’t its name just make a lot more sense now?<\/p>\n
Oh, and one other thing. The game boasts compatibility with just about every controller you can connect to your Wii, but you really don’t want to use anything but the Wiimote and Nunchuk anyway. Plugging in a Classic or Gamecube controller would be like trying to play Mario on Kinect.<\/p>\n
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