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Einhander: Games
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The very best thing about Einhander ... is the equipment at your disposal during the game: your ship itself and the array of weapons at your disposal. Your ship is equipped with a single mechanised 'arm' (hence the title of the game) which can grab and mount enemy weapons, allowing you to switch between various items in your arsenal as you wish. This is a far better system than many earlier shooters in which once you had picked up a certain weapon you were effectively stuck with it.. and leads to a certain strategic element as you try to collect and store the right weapon for a particular section or boss.
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Einhander is Square's first attempt at a shooter style game. I suppose they figured what hell...they appear to have the RPG style game down to a science, they have already released two fighting games; the very nice Tobol No. 1 and the exceptional Tobol No. 2, so why not try and conquer the twitch / shooter market as well. Well, square has definitely done their homework and investigated the genre quite well before implementing Einhander...but do they succeed with the final product? Read on!
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Backed by its solid gameplay, Einhander excels in style and presentation. The locations traveled through on Earth represent two extremes, from the Blade Runner inspired capital megacity and the many state of the art, well armed factories and supply depots built by the Empire, to the desolate ruins and wastelands that serve as reminders of Earth's lingering devastation. During all this, the game makes an admirable attempt to keep you immersed in the story. FMV and pilot narration sequences are scattered throughout the game's pivotal moments, and in between stages, you receive messages from your superiors briefing you on your next target during end of stage score calculations. In the game's climatic moment, you receive an order to take down an enemy shuttle headed for the moon within a two minute time limit. Your performance in this operation leads to two outcomes, where failure results in an automatic bad ending, and success continues the game further, introducing an unexpected yet welcome plot twist.
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Sometimes the underdog titles are the best, and Einhander's no exception. It's only one game and lacks the star power of the R-Type franchise, but even so, it's a highly pretty and well worth owning 2D shoot-em-up title. The trick to gameplay in Einhander is about managing weapons - variant ships can carry one, two (but swappable and dual-fire), or three (swappable) weapons along with the ship's standard minigun, which varies in power depending on your choice. Weapons have to be stolen from destroyed enemies, fall off the screen, and can even be shot and destroyed if you're not careful.
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Einhander isn't particularly long, but shooters almost never are. The half dozen or so stages are seamlessly interconnected and demand just over an hour to plow through in total. Each stage - in fact, each part of each stage - grows progressively more difficult, such that you'll constantly face new challenges in the form of smarter, meaner enemies and more of them. Likewise, the mid and end-level bosses will constantly keep you guessing, as they tend to be both unpredictable and versatile in their attack styles. Even shooter veterans will have their hands full with Einhander, though multiple difficulty settings make the game accessible and enjoyable even for those whose hand-eye coordination isn't what it used to be.
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The only thing that really goes against Einhander is the lack of a 2 player mode. This has the potential to hamper the replay value for some gamers who love to do a cooperative shoot-fest with their friends. For the most part, this can be overlooked because the single player mode is simply unparalleled to any next generation shooter.
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