Iridion II Reviews

Directly porting Iridion II to Steam feels a little bit unjustified; I think that explicitly bundling it with Iridion 3D and maybe the Nanostray games would have made this release feel a little bit more reasonable. Still, I am happy that Iridion II isn't a game lost to time. Even though it has lost the gee-wiz factor of running on such primitive hardware, Iridion II is still a great shooting game with plenty of content.

I like this game, as this is a digital version of the GameBoy Advance title. The graphics, the music (oof, the music!), the gameplay, the bosses, the planets (really cool colors :D), everything in this game is awesome and I'm glad I have this title once more :'D

Still great, although a basic port. It would have been nice if the graphics had been updated in resolution a little whilst still keeping a degree of crunchy pixel goodness.

I played this game so much as a kid and fully forgot about it. playing this game for just 10 minutes had me experiencing more nostalgia than I ever have in my whole life. Such an amazing game to grab if u played it back in the day.

Iridion 2 is an interesting relic of the final days of SNES style mode 7. Its primary selling point at the time was the interesting 3d perspective, which, while it still holds up today is more of a curiosity than a graphical draw. The game itself is a vertical shooter that plays very similarly to cross code. Its not a terribly challenging game, but that might be a positive. The game consists of 15 scrolling stages with unique backgrounds and bosses. The color pallettes are great, the enemies and projectiles pop out very well. The levels are usually pretty engaging, but I would say near the end they get samey, especially since the projectile patterns and enemy AI don't change much and there aren't many stage gimmicks and set pieces. Theres a variety of different weapons to choose from, and a weird mechanic where you can shift where the secondary shields are positioned. I didn't really understand the point of that, I always kept them at the side. Do I recommend it as a game? probably. It's not a hard game or a ground breaking game, but its a unique game with good music and good sprite work. I think the price tag however might be a bit high considering it can be beaten in a few hours. But I enjoyed playing a relaxing and straight forward almost modern shmup.

Relative to Iridion 3D, Iridion II has more sophisticated designs. Some new functions are not easy to master. Player must spend a lot of time to familiarize the game. But it's really fun. All beautiful 3D maps include some static obstacles, different enemies, a mid-boss and a final boss. I managed to beat the game by using the save function every ten seconds. By the way, player can enter a special password to unlock the Jukebox option and enjoy all background music.

Cool game, GBA classic shmup. 3 save states and a specialized emulation menu. It's pretty cool how well the music holds up. Asking price is stupid high, though; you can get comparable Sega Genesis classic games for <$2 normally. Get it if you're a fan and just want to throw money at Shin'En, or if it's very deep discount and you want to see what GBA could do with it's 17mhz processor and 400k of RAM.

An easygoing shmup for the Game-Boy Advance that has a soundtrack among the best of the system, and also an impressive presentation overall. Game-play wise it offers a good ammount of content with 15 stages, but it is a slower paced and more of a traditional shooter in its design, with some memorization heavy sections but nothing really notable other than the the boss rush mode in terms of challenge; also a handful of tunes can become too repetitive like the one for the bosses.

Iridion II is one of my favorite games on the GBA and has quite possibly my favorite video game soundtrack of all time. I was incredibly excited when I saw it was coming to Steam and purchased it today as soon as I saw the notification that it was available. Unfortunately, I really can’t say I recommend this release. It seems to do nothing but emulate the original GBA ROM, without a single improvement to the graphics or (as far as I can tell) the audio. Given that it looks to be running at the same internal resolution as a GBA game, it looks very bad set to fullscreen on a 4K monitor, and is a very small window when set to anything else— maybe those with 1080p monitors will find this more bearable. The only added feature is a menu that is accessible by hitting escape that allows you to rebind controls, choose between fullscreen, 2x, 3x, or 4x window size, turn on smoothing, turn on stretching, and access three save states. However, the smoothing feature does nothing to improve the visuals, as it really just turns the game from a pixel-y mess into a blurry one, and I really don’t even see a difference when turning the “stretch” option on. Strangely enough, even the control rebinding doesn’t even work properly, as I had to rebind the A button setting to what I wanted the B button to be and vice-versa. The save state feature is a very welcome addition though, as the game relied on passwords to save progress (which is still baked into the game and is usable if you prefer it for some reason), so I guess you can’t say this port is entirely bad. All in all, there is basically no reason for me to choose to play this game on PC over my original GBA cartridge, which thankfully I still have; it looks worse on PC and runs the exact same. It’s also an unfortunate reality that you can get a better experience graphically and feature-wise by playing this game through an emulator that supports better upscaling options (though of course if this is the method you choose and don't already own the game, find a way to support the devs.) It’s awesome to see this game get re-released, but I really hope that in the future, we see a remaster or remake that more effectively brings it into the modern era… but given how much of a surprise even the release of this port was, I’m unfortunately not optimistic. Soundtrack is still bangin’ tho.

Fun shooting game with interesting visuals originally on the Gameboy advance. While I recommend the game let it be known that it is a very straight forward port with little to no changes. The control scheme is a bit counter intuitive if you are playing on an Arcade stick so rebinding through steam is likely a good idea for most. I still recommend the title and it is especially impressive given the time and hardware for which it was originally released. I do have a CRT monitor to play games like this so that does a long way in making the visuals pop. As mentioned in a negative review it would likely scale rather poorly to higher resolutions on lcd monitors.