Soul Star

Soul Star is an action shooter from the British studio Core Design that tries to offer several different playstyles within a single game. The framing is a simple sci-fi story about a last-ditch defense against an invading alien fleet, but the missions themselves alternate between different perspectives: one moment you're flying through space with a behind-the-ship view, the next you're fighting through horizontally scrolling sections above a planet's surface, and in other segments you switch to a top-down view, controlling a vehicle or a foot soldier as you blast through the narrow corridors of a base. Transitions between the different styles flow smoothly within a single campaign.

Each mission type has its own pacing. The space sections are the fastest and revolve around dodging and quickly shooting down formations, the surface sections give more room for maneuvering, and the top-down parts feel more like classic arcade action focused on finding a path and destroying generators. The game rewards you for carefully rescuing civilians and for properly making use of weapon upgrades that carry over between missions. That variety is both its biggest draw and its biggest weakness, since not all its parts are equally polished. Still, it's precisely this switching between perspectives that keeps the game fresh and never lets any single one of its modes overstay its welcome.

Technically it's a typical showcase of how Core Design pushed the hardware. The game makes heavy use of scaling and rotating objects, something the Mega-CD handles better than the plain Mega Drive, and pairs it with disc-based music with a strongly atmospheric, at times almost dark tone. At the time reviewers praised its ambition and spectacle while also flagging its uneven difficulty. In hindsight, Soul Star is an interesting record of a period when developers tried to combine three genres into one simply because the disc finally gave them enough room, and even today it manages to entertain with its pace and inventiveness. The space sections come off best, with the most momentum and the biggest payoff from the effects the game likes to show off.