Stellar Assault

The 32X needed to show what its add-on hardware could do beyond a plain Mega Drive, and one of the titles meant to play this role was Stellar Assault – a space shooter developed exclusively for this add-on. The player sits in the cockpit of a fighter and flies through linear space corridors, where they're attacked by waves of enemy ships, mines, and giant bosses at the end of individual levels.

The gameplay is based on the principle of an "on-rails" shooter – the ship moves along the screen's axis, the player aims and dodges, while the scenery around them rushes by thanks to the scaling and rotation effects the 32X was proud of and that were meant to show it was something more than just an upgraded Mega Drive. Between individual missions, forks in the path occasionally appear, so the game also offers a bit of freedom in choosing the route and order of battles, which wasn't entirely a given for similar titles at the time. The difficulty rises fairly quickly, and without properly memorizing attack patterns and enemy placement, the player won't get very far.

Today, Stellar Assault is a rather forgotten affair, known mainly to collectors and 32X fans, but at the time of release, it was one of the few titles that could show at a glance what the add-on graphics unit was actually for. The visual effects were impressive at the time and proved that the 32X could handle pseudo-3D scenes too, even though the actual shooting feel remains noticeably more bare-bones than competing space action games on other platforms.

Why play: Because it shows the technical ambitions of the 32X in a game that simply couldn't have existed on another console of that generation.