Watch that polarity!

Ikaruga is a very, very difficult game. The odds are definitely stacked against you as your little ship is constantly being bombarded with hundreds of bullets coming at you. It just takes one of those little suckers with the wrong polarity to put a serious cramp in your style. With so much action happening at any given time it almost seems unreal that you can survive. Indeed, you often don’t. You will find that the enemy attacks in patterns and part of the game is actually learning these patterns so that you can position yourself and know when you should be switching the polarity of your ship. This can take several, and I mean several, times to figure out. The game never seems to take cheap shots at you, it just happens to take a lot of shots at you. So when you die, you only have yourself to blame. Well, that and about a million bullets!

Graphically the game is fairly average. The backgrounds have some detail, but honestly you will be so focused on dodging everything around that you will never have the time to check out the scenery. Despite the chaos the frame rate stays nice and steady throughout. There are several different modes, but really they are just different variations of the same. You can play two-player cooperative in all of the game type except for the Challenge mode, which makes sense.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 83%.  Ikaruga is insane in the membrane, at least with regards to its difficulty. So you have to ask yourself if you’re feeling lucky punk, or at least especially skilled. If you are up for the challenge/frustration then this just might be the game for you.

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