Sine Mora Review

Even the best story can't hold a game up unless the music and graphical environments are there to match it, so fans of the genre should be especially pleased to know that Sine Mora delivers handily in this department. The game's world, which is fleshed out with vivid colors and incredibly sharp environments, is played on in 2D world, which is the general standard for the genre. Being an HD console title, however, this is complemented by a 3D engine which periodically pans the camera in and out as the on-screen character flies around a mountain or dives into the sea. This carries on to the game's bosses which are spectacularly massive with parts of their bodies fading into the background and foreground to lessen the plain 2D effect that other games in the genre have fallen into. Needless to say, if you love shoot-'em-ups, but needed a little extra oomph, Sine Mora should be right up your alley. In addition the soundtrack, while not overly memorable to any degree, compliments the game nicely and isn't grating on the nerves.

Of course for hardcore fans while a story mode is nice and everything, what they really want is complete mastery over the game and that comes in the form of leaderboards. This takes place in Sine Mora's Score Attack mode which allows players to mix and match the available characters and ships to make their own combinations that suit their style of play. In addition, two new time-based abilities are available alongside the original one from Story Mode which let you rewind time or deflect bullets back to the enemy.

There has to be a catch to all this newfound freedom, however, and that comes in the decidedly fiendish scoring system the mode uses. Like in all shoot-'em-up titles you get a multiplier as long as you keep evading enemy attacks which exponentially boosts your overall score. In Sine Mora, however, the game penalizes you for using your secondary attack as any use of it will automatically reset the multiplier. In practice it's a simple yet incredibly smart idea as it allows newcomers to get through the mode without too much trouble with enough practice since it doesn't limit them from using it, but instead puts the pressure on hardcore users who want to do things perfectly. Shoot-'em-up fans know full well that this these kinds of games require tons of time learning their inner mechanics and the genius of Sine Mora is that it recognizes this fact and full heartedly embraces it.

In addition to the Score Attack there's also an Arcade mode which reduces the time in each level severely to 15 seconds and forces the player to restart from the beginning each time. Both this mode and Score Attack force the player to choose either the Hard or Insane difficulties instead of the more easier normal difficulty found in the Story mode.