Sin and Punishment: Star Successor

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is a dense, loud, and uncompromising action game from a studio famous for technically demanding shooters. The game carries you along a fixed path through the environment, while you aim a cursor across the screen and simultaneously dodge with a character who runs, jumps, and slides along the ground. The result is an unusual combination of a classic rail shooter and platforming action, in which you have to track two things at once: where you're shooting and where you're standing. It's exactly this split attention that makes the title a challenge you need a while to get used to.

The screen is almost constantly filled with projectiles. Most of them can be deflected back at the attacker with a swing, which turns defense into an additional source of points, and the game constantly offers the player a choice between going for score or going for survival. The boss fights are the main draw and surpass most of what the genre has produced in both scale and inventiveness. Each one has several transformations, changes the environment around itself, and often feels like a standalone game in its own right. Aiming with the Wii Remote suits this type of action superbly and is noticeably faster and more precise than an analog stick. The game also supports a classic controller, but with a pointer in hand the whole concept makes far more sense. A two-player mode on a single screen was also added.

Technically it's an impressive feat on Wii. The screen can handle an enormous number of objects and effects without noticeable slowdown, and the color scheme of the sci-fi world is bold and stylized. The music is energetic, electronic, and drives the action forward. The title is one that critics received very well, but the wider audience passed it by, since the genre was niche at the time and the game comes across as off-putting at first glance. Today it's one of the console's most valuable lesser-known gems and an ideal choice for a few hours of intense action where every second and every hit counts. Anyone who gets through it once usually comes back for a better score.