Topdown shooter, fun, fun fun!
The entire Ikari Warriors series has been a staple of great top down shooting, on the NES, on the DOS operating system and, I think on a few other consoles and home PCs though their entire history of platforms surely escapes me. In a way they kind of defined what top down shooter games had to be and many others, Metal Gear Solid and the like have borrowed from it. Anyway the lessons we learn from this second title is that expanding a title doesn't need to mean going out and about and changing things up just for the novelty of it. Nope, a game can still keep true to its mechanical bits, but make the world more sprawling, and the game as polished as it can be. And that's what Ikari Warriors 2 is in the end, an action shooter with just the right amount of exploration and, well, bits you could call a puzzle, but the focus is on shooting while avoiding enemy fire and finding your way around. The game follows the recipe to the end, within all sort of nicely done, though at times repetitive scenarios. But, frankly, once you get the hand of it, you'll find it more than enough, and won't be thinking that you need anything else. Oh, and the music is as cheeky as 8 bit could deliver, hehe!
