Darius Twin Review

When I was in Jr. High my family took a trip to the Oregon coast. Long story short we stopped at this little mall on the way back home and I found this game rental place. They had a bin of games they were selling and I rifled through it and picked three games. Darius Twin, BOB (I think), and I can’t remember the third one. Secret of The Stars? Maybe? Anyway. I got all three for $20. Not a bad deal.

So I get home and I pop it in expecting it to be a lot like Gradius/Life Force from the box art and, wouldn’t you know it, it was.

There’s a story about some evil aliens out to destroy us, the good aliens. And we, the good aliens, send out our finest pilot(s) to stop the evil aliens. The evil aliens have many fish based battleships we have to deal with.

That’s your story. It’s a summary, but not by much.

As I eluded to earlier the game play is very much Gradius/Life Force/R-Type kind of a vibe. The Darius series began in the arcades and made it over to the SNES and TG16 eventually. A lot of the 16 bit home consoles became the landing site for a lot of arcade ports and spin off games and this is a spin off from the original series.

We fly our ship through a variety of different worlds collection power ups, blowing things up and trying not to blow things up. At the end of each stage we have a boss which is – as previously mentioned – are generally fish based. Pretty straight forward stuff.

Remember Chip ‘n Dale on the NES and how it had that map? Or maybe StarFox? FTL? Darius Twin does the same. You can pick different routes through the game. This adds a nice little bit of variety to what is generally a pretty static experience with games of this type.

Graphically the game is really quite good. It looks and feels like an arcade game. Bright and crisp colors, well designed sprites, massive bosses, tons of things happening on screen. Sometimes it can get a little overwhelming when the backgrounds get a little excessive but it’s not too bad at all.

The music is also really good. It’s energetic, it’s got a lot of action, it’s got drive. It’s not quite as good as, say, Gradius 3, but it’s very appropriate for the stages and boss fights. Solid soundtrack for a very solid game.