Does an early PlayStation vertical shooter hold up today?
What Is It? RayStorm is a 1996 vertical SHMUP for the PlayStation 1 which was ported to a few other consoles and later remastered in Ray’z Arcade Chronology.
RayStorm has you choosing between two ships. Each has a laser-like weapon which can constantly fire, a missile which can lock onto enemies and home, and a special attack which can clear out many enemies in one shot. The weapons differ between the two ships, but not drastically.
You also decide between “Auto” and “Manual” controls, this only affects the missile attacks. For auto, it will automatically fire after you’ve locked onto something, whereas manual forces you to hit a button to fire.
Once you have your ship selected, your polygon spacecraft is placed into a city and the vertical scrolling beings. Constantly firing your laser is effective, but will slow you down slightly so you may need to release it occasionally to dodge some of the extra hectic bullet-hell moments.
The crux of the gameplay is locking onto enemies with your missiles. Your ship has a lock on target permanently fixed a few ship lengths in front of you. You need to maneuver so this target passes over an enemy which will trigger a lock. This is necessary as many of the enemies in the game show up in the background and cannot be hit with your laser attack.
While you are trying to blow away everything on screen, the game will throw endless waves of enemies and bullets at you. The screen gets quite chaotic at times and it is a testament to the game that there is only one portion of the main game which noticeably slows down.
The game features seven short levels, each with a boss at the end. You get four lives and six continues to try to clear all of the levels. It is not nearly as easy as it sounds, as one hit will kill you. You, thankfully, start back in the exact same spot after death. The entire game can be beaten in under an hour, but RayStorm will keep you busy for significantly longer than that as you try to get good enough to make it through to the end.
The game has a difficulty scale which defaults to 5 on the NTSC version and 3 on the Japanese. The problem with NTSC is that if you drop the difficulty down, you cannot play past the first few levels. This makes the NTSC version of RayStorm a particularly tough game in the SHMUP genre not known for being terribly easy to begin with.
The Best Part: The constant rush to lock onto targets. This is the crux of the game and it really works well. You will die many quick deaths if you are unable to lock onto the majority of enemies that show up on screen. The base laser is kind of weak, it takes a fair amount of blasting to kill most things, but the missiles are mostly one-hit kills. This small detail forces you to maneuver your ship not only to avoid fire, but also to target enemies. This is a fun addition which adds to the absolutely hectic atmosphere of the game where deadly projectiles are already flying everywhere on the screen.
The Worst Part: It is sometimes difficult to tell which enemies are on your level or not. This is important because you can’t use your laser on enemies not on your level and, more importantly, you can run into enemies on your level and die. After playing the short game a few times you will start to learn which enemies are and aren’t, but this is a pretty big annoyance early on and even carries over to some bosses. I swear I’ve flown over the same parts of an enemy boss multiple times and sometimes it hits me, other times it doesn’t.
The Verdict: RayStorm is a perfectly fine PS1 SHMUP. Its primary mechanical appeal is the lock-on system and what that requires from the player. This is a fun system that works well to add another movement-based level of difficulty to the game. The game doesn’t feature any weapon upgrades or power ups. You can collect gems to add additional lock-on slots which are certainly helpful, but this is different from completely different weapons that many games in the genre offer.
The game looks good for the era and runs well, which is great to see given how hectic the screen gets at times.
I think RayStorm is one for the diehard SHMUP fans or those who like a very particular set of SHMUP mechanics. There are many other games of the era, and beyond, that do a lot more mechanically, but RayStorm is a fun option for a straightforward, movement-based entry in the genre.
How to Play:PlayStation 1*, Saturn, Xbox 360. HD Collection: PlayStation 4, Switch
*console played on for this review
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