Game:

Sine Mora (2012)

Duration: 1:37:31

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Sine Mora is a horizontal 2.5d shoot'em up which means that the environments are created with 3d objects, but you actually move on a 2d plane.

The game essentially has 4 difficulty levels. There is a story mode which shuffles the stages in a way that makes sense from a story perspective and an arcade mode which lets you play them in their actual order without cutscenes. Story mode lets you choose between normal and challenging mode. Arcade mode starts with hard difficulty and offers insane difficulty as well.

normal mode is easy. If you have played shoot'em ups before, you will likely beat normal mode on your first try. Challenging mode may keep you busy for a few days until you can beat it with no or moderate credit feeding.

Hard only offers three credits and you will run into time constraints a lot, especially during boss fights. You need to know which boss turrets to destroy first and in which way to not explode due to a lack of time. This one is a challenge even for shooter veterans and leads me to the first big pro about sine mora: it caters to both beginners and veterans. In this game you don't get destroyed every 5 screens and credit feed your way past the final boss nor do you just breeze through the game. There is a balanced difficulty setting for everyone. oh, and if you're bored with hard mode, there is also insane mode where destroyed enemies will leave a circle of bullets that gradually expands in a wavy pattern.

Let's have a look at the controls for pc. For consoles, there are no issues at all. They are pretty much perfect and they are also on pc if you have an xbox controller. Out of the box, the game only supports the 360 controller. Any other gamepad is not available in-game and you need to use the keyboard to play. In order to use a different game pad, you need to use software that emulates an xbox controller. I tried that with my qanba arcade stick and it worked. Well, it worked, but it didn't feel right. Sine mora relies on analog controls. Using digital input works, but it is not precise enough as the game is not designed for that input.

the graphics and art style are great. i love the stage design and boss encounters as well as the use of colors and how everything fits together artistically. i also never noticed any graphical glitches on the 360 or the pc.

the audio is phenomenal! the soundtrack was composed by Akira Yamaoka who's most notable game sountracks were that of the silent hill series among others. the voice over is pretty cool too. the text is available in english and other languages, but the spoken lines are in Hungarian only. that's no disadvantage at all. it sounds much more believable in this specific setting than some call of duty inspired semi-professional sounding quarter-assed military speech.

from what i have said so far, sine mora seems to be a great shoot'em up with almost no flaws. well, yes, i think it is a very good game and absolutely worth the low price. however, i was wondering why a lot of people on the internet seem to dismiss sine mora as kindergarten stuff. for my conclusion as to why that may be, i have to explain a few things first.

experienced shoot'em up players don't play story mode to see the credits roll and move on to the next game. what these people want from a good shmup are perfect controls and a deep scoring system. especially bullet hell shooters have very complex scoring methods. depending on the game, it could be the proximity to bullets, a combo chain of kills, specific ways to kill bosses and all their weak points, etc. sine mora does not have that. you do get a score multiplier called „rank" depending on your kills and whether you get hit or use slowdown, reflection or rewind abilities, but that's about it. therefore, veterans shouldn't expect to get much long-term gameplay out of it, but still, it's a budget game with high production value and fun to play.

if that got you interested, please have a look at my playthrough on challenging mode with the alternate ending and narration and consider subscribing to my channel. thank you.

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