Nanostray Review

The pace is kept refreshingly high throughout and the level of hand-eye coordination required in the final two 'High resistance' stages climbs towards mesospheric. Boss battles are mainly tests of endurance and concentration: once you've picked up their movement and firing patterns, they're not too hard to defeat, but the learning process can be a long and painful one.

Once a level has been beaten in Adventure mode, you can then think about tackling them in Arcade or Challenge mode. It's the Arcade mode which provides most satisfaction, as you play through each level with just three ships and only regain one spent smart bomb with every new life. Shin'en have set up a world ranking website for you to upload 'Nanocodes' once you beat a particular stage, which allows you to see how your performance ranks against others around the world. This provides a huge incentive to improve your scores and nudge yourself further up the table. To get the highest scores you're required to take advantage of the bonus scoring system in the game.

You're rewarded for not using smart bombs, losing lives and the all important Valour bonus can be a significant source of points. Valour can be gained by only shooting your weapon when necessary (rather than just holding the button down) and by collecting coins by flying through them, instead of using your 'Attract' ability. Most points are gained, however, by not using your secondary power weapon until you reach the stage Boss. Destroying complete waves of enemies will drop a blue coin, worth 500 points. If, however, you destroy wave after wave of enemies without using your power weapons, the value of these points rapidly stack up: 2x500, 3x500, etc. On a stage where there may be 30-40 waves of enemies, the value of relying on your primary weapons alone rapidly becomes apparent (30x500 is a lot of points!) and you will need to do this if you ever hope to compete with the big boys in the world rankings.

The Challenge mode is similar to the Arcade mode, except it tasks you to complete levels according to certain criteria, such as having only one ship, or not having secondary power weapons. Beating a Challenge will reward you with a picture you can view in the game gallery, accessed from the main game menu, but otherwise provides the player with no incentive to play them other than to test their skill.

There are only really two flaws in the game. Firstly, the touch screen integration is poor. It's only really used to allow you to switch weapons on the fly (which unfortunately requires you to take your thumb away from the firing buttons) or to scan for the weak spots on end of level Bosses. The radar on the touch screen is also entirely superfluous. It's a nice cosmetic touch, perhaps, but an entirely unnecessary distraction during game play. Secondly, you can destroy enemies that have moved beyond the edge of the rendered playing area. This can result in you destroying enemy waves before they even come on the screen, which prevents you from being able to collect the blue coins needed to rack up your score. Whilst you might consider this a blessing when you first start to play the game, it rapidly becomes an annoyance as you improve your level of skill and strive to get ever closer to that perfect score.

Fortunately, committed players will learn how to work around this flaw in the combat modelling, and the annoyance factor never becomes a fatal one. Overall, Nanostray is a solid, good looking title that sits neatly in its own little niche in the DS portfolio. While it's nothing revolutionary and doesn't really fulfil the potential of the platform it has been designed on, until the next DS shooter comes along, it will more than satisfy the needs of the twitchiest of fingers.