Remember Ice Climber, Balloon Fight, Wrecking Crew, Startropics, and other games that for the most part, didn't get sequels and become franchises? There was a time when Nintendo wasn't a sequel and spinoff factory, and tried many new ideas.
Steel Diver is one of their most original ideas in a long time, and it has a certain NES-like mentality to it, for both better and worse.
The game is refreshingly plotless. Just choose a mission, ignore or skip the brief meaningless briefing that scrolls by, and jump onboard. Your goal is to reach the end of the level, by maneuvering your submarine by use of levers on the touch screen. You accelerate and decelerate forwards and backwards, tilt up or down, and surface or dive, all at different speeds depending on how far you moved the lever or rotated the dial.
Rather than simply pushing up, down, left and right to move directly, the movement feels like you're controlling an actual vehicle with real weight. As such, you have to be careful of your movement and compensate if you accelerated too much in any direction. If you zip at full speed and are about to hit a wall, moving the lever to neutral won't stop your movement on a dime, but switching it to reverse will help it reverse course more quickly, making it easier to come to a stop. This principle of momentum is what makes the game what it is - a sort of arcade-style 2D submarine simulation.
There's also a bonus stage after each level, where you look through a periscope and try to shoot torpedoes at ships. You have to take distance and speed into account, as the torpedoes move at a specific speed, and you want your target to be at the right spot when the torpedo is there so it can hit it. This mode can also be played separately.
The one mode I haven't tried yet is the strategic Battleship-esque game.
While the game is refreshingly pick-up-and-play, and very original, it's also let down by its NES-style design. See, these gameplay modes are all there is. 7 levels of the simulation mode. 3 levels of periscope strike. It's what you'd expect from an NES game, not a modern one.
That complaint aside, I have to hand it to Nintendo for creating something experimental, original, and rather enjoyable if it happens to be your thing.
The type of experimentation Nintendo used to do
Remember Ice Climber, Balloon Fight, Wrecking Crew, Startropics, and other games that for the most part, didn't get sequels and become franchises? There was a time when Nintendo wasn't a sequel and spinoff factory, and tried many new ideas.
Steel Diver is one of their most original ideas in a long time, and it has a certain NES-like mentality to it, for both better and worse.
The game is refreshingly plotless. Just choose a mission, ignore or skip the brief meaningless briefing that scrolls by, and jump onboard. Your goal is to reach the end of the level, by maneuvering your submarine by use of levers on the touch screen. You accelerate and decelerate forwards and backwards, tilt up or down, and surface or dive, all at different speeds depending on how far you moved the lever or rotated the dial.
Rather than simply pushing up, down, left and right to move directly, the movement feels like you're controlling an actual vehicle with real weight. As such, you have to be careful of your movement and compensate if you accelerated too much in any direction. If you zip at full speed and are about to hit a wall, moving the lever to neutral won't stop your movement on a dime, but switching it to reverse will help it reverse course more quickly, making it easier to come to a stop. This principle of momentum is what makes the game what it is - a sort of arcade-style 2D submarine simulation.
There's also a bonus stage after each level, where you look through a periscope and try to shoot torpedoes at ships. You have to take distance and speed into account, as the torpedoes move at a specific speed, and you want your target to be at the right spot when the torpedo is there so it can hit it. This mode can also be played separately.
The one mode I haven't tried yet is the strategic Battleship-esque game.
While the game is refreshingly pick-up-and-play, and very original, it's also let down by its NES-style design. See, these gameplay modes are all there is. 7 levels of the simulation mode. 3 levels of periscope strike. It's what you'd expect from an NES game, not a modern one.
That complaint aside, I have to hand it to Nintendo for creating something experimental, original, and rather enjoyable if it happens to be your thing.