In Defense: Sine Mora

*cracks knuckles*

Alright, this is my first time writing up a blog post in a while so...if I'm a little bit outta practice then don't be surprised!

Sine Mora is latin for "without delay", which is basically a good estimate of how quickly you should invest in this sweet, sweet game. Just recently released as a downloadable title on the XBox Live Arcade, Sine Mora is a side-scrolling pseudo-bullet hell shooter with some cool elements to it, an amazing art style, and some of the most satisfying gameplay I've experienced in the genre for a long time. Sit down, and I shall tell you a tale...of vulgar Hungarian-speaking anthropomorphic animals that travel through time *majestic arm wave*.

Sine Mora functions like just about any other side-scrolling shooter out there: you control a ship that's consistently moving through a level plagued by enemies and beasts that threaten to thrash your ride and (in some cases) make you their dinner. Your only option is to blast them with every weapon your little ship has. I described Sine Mora as a "pseudo-bullet hell" shooter...I've used this term because I recently read an interview where one of the developers said that it is not a true bullet-hell, since the bullet swarms that are thrown your way always give more than enough space for your ship's hitbox to fit through. That being said, this game is still damn tight in spots and you'll find the screen loaded with gunshots and missiles that weave around in beautiful but dangerous patterns. Luckily for you, time is on your side...sort of.

You sunk my...ah, fuck it.

The unique quality that Sine Mora has going for it is that your lifeline is a timer. For each segment of the game, you are given a time limit that counts down as you make your way through each level. When you blow an enemy away, time is added to the limit and you're on your merry way. Conversely, if your ship takes a bullet to the hull, you lose time. When your time reaches zero, you're history (TIME JOKE!). This makes the game function in a much different way from most, in that your best strategy is really to focus on destroying everything you come across to preserve as much time for yourself as you can. Simply avoiding enemies and selectively shooting down only the biggest threats will likely get you nowhere, and you have to make it a priority to keep your time up by blasting everything you possibly can. That's not to say that the time limit isn't forgiving...you definitely have a good amount of spare time as long as you destroy a decent amount of your opposition. At the same time, the game becomes extremely tense if you are low on your time reserve and struggling to make it to the end of your current level segment, frantically dodging bullets and hitting everything you can to survive. This tension is awesome, I think, and it really makes you start to think about how you can optimize your attack patterns to make things easier on yourself.

The other interesting thing that sets this apart from a true bullet hell is that since the time limit is essentially your life meter, your ship can manage to take more than a single hit as long as you have some time on the clock, making things a tad more forgiving than most side-scrolling shooters out there. There are still instances of one hit kills, though...but I have found that they are at times where they make perfect sense (except for this one really strange incident involving a piano that I just encountered the other day...don't ask).

In true shooter fashion, you upgrade the hell out of your ship until it becomes a free-flying death machine capable of eliminating a large country on its own. A pickup will fly out of a destroyed enemy from time to time (*nudge* EH? EH??) and gathering these up should be one of your biggest priorities. Among the pickups you can find are standard firepower upgrades that increase your primary weapon's power output and (usually) spread pattern; time extensions that put seconds on the clock (the amount differs depending on certain situations or your difficulty setting); score tokens that increase your overall score; a shield that will activate and remain online upon taking a hit, saving you from damage and protecting you for about 5 seconds afterwards; and an extend function, which gives you an extra 10 seconds after the time limit depletes. The final two types of pickups you can encounter are sub-weapons and capsules, which I'll explain in further detail.

Sub weapons are unique to each pilot, of which there are seven. Some of these are great screen-clearing methods when you're in a pinch, such as Durak's circular-slicing Sonic Sword and Ronotra Koss' area of effect explosion, the Punk Spirit. Others are much more offensive and directed, making them great for taking out large threats quickly. For example, Akita Dryad's Azimuth Battery fires quick, blue energy forward in a tight spread that racks up high damage; and Lynthe Ytoo's Zebaoth Driller is a high-powered laser beam that lasts about 5 seconds, giving you time to either focus it on a single enemy or sweep it around, cutting through both your foes and obliterating their shots to clear things up a bit. It seems that each sub weapon has its own use, and figuring out when to use them is key to survival and high scores. You can have up to 5 sub weapons stored up at once, so use them wisely.

Planes that convert to submarines? MIND BLOWN!

As for the capsule...well, it plays into the time theme of Sine Mora. The time capsule that your ship is equipped with can have one of three different functions. The standard one that you wind up using throughout the whole of the story mode is Speed Up. By pressing the capsule button (RT by default), time will slow down on the screen and (hopefully) allow you to weave your ship safely between the dazzling array of shots heading for your face. Your time capsule is filled up about 25% by those capsule pickups I mentioned earlier, so it's not infinite and it drains pretty quick when you have it activated. As a result, you need to budget it efficiently and only use it when you need it. The other two functions you can select from later are Reflect and Roll Back. Reflect creates a barrier of time around your ship that'll turn an enemy's bullets right back against it, dealing damage and saving your hide. The Roll Back capsule reverses time, even after you die...potentially giving you another chance at dodging that incoming threat that took you down or snag a pickup that you really needed and missed. Pretty cool stuff, but sub-weapons and capsules come at a bit of a price.

That price that I mention is your ranking. As you play through a level on Arcade or Score Attack mode, you have a rank meter that increases as you fire, blow things up, and pick up powerups. However, taking a hit or using your time capsule or sub-weapon will cause this meter to decrease. If you're nuts about getting good scores to try and attack the leaderboards, you have to do your best to NOT use your special abilities, or at least use them only when you absolutely have to. In addition to this, you have a score multiplier that will increase as you destroy enemies, up to a maximum of 9x score. However, this is also taken back down to 1x if you activate your capsule or sub weapon. Your rank in each level begins at C, then as the meter fills it will progress to B, and then A. Your end rank for a level is determined by how much time you spend in each of these three ranks, as well as some other factors like using a continue or taking damage. It's a very interesting trade-off scoring method that really pressures you to perfecting your gameplay and avoiding the use of your special abilities, despite how much you'll want to.

I've already mentioned Arcade and Score Attack modes, but there's also an intriguing Story mode and a Boss Practice mode. For most of these game modes, you pick a ship (there are 3 to choose from, each with different primary guns and upgrade patterns for them), a character which comes packaged with their specific sub-weapon, and a capsule mode. Obviously this gives you a lot of choice with how you play the game, and there are many possibilities and combinations of ships, sub weapons and time effects, so finding one combination that you like amongst the 63 that you can potentially choose from is fun to do. Arcade mode makes you choose a difficulty level (Hard and Insane only...some pretty hardcore stuff!) and throws you through 7 ordered stages in a race against time to beat the final boss, plain and simple. Score Attack lets you choose a specific stage to run through, at which point you do your damnedest to get a high rank and score for the leaderboards. Boss Practice lets you...practice fighting bosses! Go figure. You pick a boss, and also set how high you want your capsule and firepower levels to be, letting you simulate if you approached a boss with full upgrades or with none at all, struggling for survival. It's a good addition too, because if you don't practice the patterns and try to get through arcade mode, you'll get smoked and frustrated.

The Story mode is pretty cool...since this game is about time travel, the story spans multiple timelines and is narrated by 6 of the 7 characters you use. There are short cutscenes within levels that have dialogue, and all of this dialogue is in Hungarian. It's a neat touch, to focus so much on a storyline, but at times it's a bit hard to follow what with it jumping all over the place. Playing through the story mode is easier than playing Arcade, as it offers lower difficulty settings and more continues. You also get to try out each ship and sub weapon as you make you way through it, so it helps you find what kind of play style you like. The plot itself is pretty nifty despite being convoluted, but it's good to see a focus on this sort of element in a genre that usual lacks in that category. It's worth a couple of playthroughs at the very least, because you unlock a second narrative eventually that will expand on more story elements when you play through a second time.

Most of the enemies are bread and butter, run of the mill material for a side-scrolling shooter. Stationary tracking guns, enemy ships and tanks, and strange alien creatures will all try to bar your path to your goal. The bosses are the real stars of the show here, though, and they don't disappoint. These range from a gigantic, armed festival blimp to a stationary cannon with a chameleon-like eyeball in it, and hit just about every note in between. Each boss follows distinct patterns and fire some amazing-looking patterns of shots that will kick your ass, but make your jaw hit the floor in the process. They can all be beaten and are all manageable, but learning how to tackle them is a feat in and of itself, and each one is so different from the rest that you'll never find yourself repeating the same dodging patterns twice. The bosses really steal the show in Sine Mora, in my opinion, and learning to take one down without taking a hit is incredibly satisfying.

Just when you thought your day was going well...in strolls the mechano-death-squid.

Sine Mora is visually stunning. The graphics are clean and crisp, with 3D models moving on 2D plane but with more of a sense of depth than usual. For example, enemies will still attack from the background or come into play from the foreground, making the gameplay much more dynamic and unpredictable and conveying the feeling that this is a 3D universe after all, with beautiful things that you're not seeing because of the way the game is set up. The backgrounds and levels are absolutely gorgeous and the artistic style doesn't disappoint...all of the little details that are packed into this rich universe really make Sine Mora stand out. When you're not awestruck by the waves and waves of laser death being flung at you, you'll definitely be distracted by looking at the spectacular backgrounds and environments.

Sound effects are standard shooter material, really. Explosions, laser blasts, and gunshots all sound like they should, with no particular surprises. The voice acting however is top-notch, despite it all being in Hungarian and incomprehensible to me. For some reason it makes the anthropomorphic animal characters more believable because they aren't speaking in English, and I think that's a pretty cool effect. There's nothing more awesome than hearing a lizard man dressed in leather pilot garb call a giant six-legged robot a "son of an ass"! The music is created by previous Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka, and I'll be honest, it doesn't really stand out. Gradius and R-Type games have way more memorable soundtracks, and so this one sort of falls by the wayside. It's effective though, in some cases, and it's not like the music is BAD. It just does what it's supposed to do...but don't expect any of it to get stuck in your head for days afterwards.

It's interesting...Sine Mora is one of the only games where I give a shit about the Achievements, because they're all worth your time and effort. It's not something stupid like "SUCCESSFULLY PASS THIS IDIOTIC QUICK TIME EVENT - 50G"...rather, the achievements are composed of sub-achievements within them. Once you complete all the sub-achievements for a rank, you gain that rank and the achievement that goes along with it. Some of these range from relatively simple tasks like completing the story mode or finding secret weak points of certain bosses, up to extremely tough challenges like taking down all of Arcade mode without using a single continue or taking down every single boss without using anything except your primary weapon. These will keep you occupied for a long time, and I plan on doing a bunch of them. I've already clocked 16 hours of gameplay time so far and I can only get up to Stage IV in Arcade on Hard mode consistently, so there's a shit ton of work to do!

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The Bottom Line

Sine Mora is an amazing side-scrolling shooter. It has a whole whack of content for you to play around with such as multiple game modes to test yourself, tons of character/ship/capsule combinations to try out, and tons of cool little challenges to do that will try your skill and patience, but fairly. The time mechanic really adds a cool element to the genre and I find it really makes for some tense and exciting moments when you're trying to gain just enough time to survive a chapter. It's a visually stunning game with tight gameplay and some great boss moments, and while it is challenging on the harder difficulties, it is also manageable for newcomers on the easier ones and would be good for introducing people to the genre. I'd recommend this game to anyone that's a fan of scrolling shooters such as Gradius, R-Type, or Ikaruga...it's definitely a very well made product that will potentially give you many hours of gameplay at a price point of only 10 bucks. That's more than I can say for some of the 60 dollar games I've purchased!

Plus you get to hear animal people swear in Hungarian. THAT SHOULD SELL THE GAME TO YOU ALONE!

9/10