As a huge fan of classic arcade titles, and modern releases that have looked to emulate their styles of play, I truly feel like we’ve been blessed in this generation. Not only have there been collections helping you celebrate classics, there have also been quite a number of neo-retro titles that can sometimes feel like they could have been contemporaries in the golden era. That relatively high bar of quality is what makes a release like S. Prysm Destroyer a disappointing head-scratcher.

Starting with the game’s look, I suppose it’s trying to have some sort of retro-ish vibe with all of the dithering of its colors, but in the end it just looks pretty awful honestly. The weird part is that it isn’t like there tend to be that many vital elements on the screen at once, and the quality of the models for what there is are pretty limited. The thing is, when you grab your super power-up, allowing you to swipe your visually-striking flaming sword around, the problems really begin to kick in. In general, it makes for quite a confusing visual soup of obscured elements, meaning that no matter how powerful you may be in those moments, you’re also enormously vulnerable to what you’ll struggle to see.

Perhaps if the platform shooting gameplay itself were more compelling, you could overlook the issues with the visuals, but overall I’d say they’re just as disappointing. While which power-ups you’ll grab will differ with each run, the general uninspired stage designs and layouts remain the same regardless, and they’re pretty dull more often than not. Once you die you’ll then just start over again, to retread more of the same… but perhaps in a new outfit that you’ll only briefly see anyway, so even those feel like they offer little to no incentives. Quite simply, there are just too many far better, varied, and more interesting retro-style games out there to feel the need to settle for this.