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PHALANX Company: Kemco Released: October 1992 Genre: Shooter Graphics: 8.0 Control: 7.0 Sound/Music: 6.0 Storyline: 5.0 Review by: Corbie Dillard ©2008 SUPER-NES.COM

Let's face it, the Super Nintendo system wasn't exactly the system of choice for shooter fans back in the 16-bit era. The Super Nintendo's slow processor made developing shooters more of a lesson in futility than anything and made the term "slowdown" a household name. Having said all that, there were a small handful of shooters released for the system that actually turned out to be outstanding games and among some of the best the genre has to offer. Unfortunately, Phalanx isn't one of them, as anyone who's played it can attest. Shooter fans will immediately feel at home with the control scheme used in Phalanx. You pilot your ship through the levels in the game where you'll occasionally face off with a mini-boss, as well as the traditional end of level boss. Although you can normally hold down the fire button for rapid firing, some of the cannon fire types allow you to charge them up, in which case you'll have to resort to rapidly pressing the fire button in order to destroy enemies. You'll also have the use of a special move that normally involves your ship spraying out cannon fire in all directions for a short period of time. These special moves will come in handy for times when you become overwhelmed with enemy ships. The control in Phalanx is smooth and responsive and you can even choose your ship's movement speed at the beginning of the game if you like your ship to move around at a faster rate of speed. This can be good and bad as it will allow you to move around enemy ships and their cannon fire more easily, but it can also make the control too touchy at the same time. The power-ups in the game are not very powerful and the high level of difficulty doesn't help matters. Even on the "Easy" setting the game automatically starts on, the game is very tough. If you're brave enough to crank the difficulty up to "Normal" or even "Hard" you're in for a short game. The control and game play in Phalanx is certainly not terrible, it just doesn't offer up anything special and when coupled with the high degree of difficulty, it makes the playing experience feel very substandard and often frustrating when compared to many of the better shooters available for the console. The visuals in Phalanx are actually pretty impressive. There's loads of detail in the backgrounds and the multi-layer scrolling is particularly impressive and adds a lot of depth to each level. While the regular enemies in the game are very well drawn, the bosses in the game tend to be very uninspired and are rather small in size when compared to end level bosses found in many other great shooters from this era. Occasionally you'll be treated to some small instances of Mode-7 scaling and rotation, but these moment are few and far between and feel rather "tacked-on" in the overall scheme of things. Maybe we've just become spoiled with such high quality shooters as Axelay and R-Type III, but Phalanx just comes off looking more medicore than anything else. The music and sound effects are another area of Phalanx that doesn't seem to measure up. The musical tracks are catchy enough, but after awhile they all begin to sound alike. The musical styling is best compared to Hudson's Star Soldier titles, although the tracks in Phalanx are much less varied and not nearly as high quality as those found in the Star Soldier games. There's no speech in the game, which was a very popular feature of shooters from this time period, and even if there were, it probably wouldn't make much of a difference anyway. Much like everything else in the game, the music and sound effects are fairly standard stuff and don't offer anything that we haven't seen or heard a hundred times before. If you're a diehard shooter fan, you might actually like Phalanx. It has everything most other shooters have, it just doesn't have anything extra to offer. The controls are basic, the difficulty is high, and the music and visuals don't offer anything that will give you any incentive to keep playing through the game when things begin to get tough. In all honesty, you'll likely fire this one up, get blown to bits, and quickly put this one on the shelf to start collecting dust. In the end, Phalanx has a lot of potential, but it never comes anywhere close to realizing any of it.