Project Sylpheed: Arc of Deception is a flight sim with the twist being its setting & anime theme. Rather than the more realistic Ace Combat series, this one takes to deep space for its combat & plot. Massive explosions, lasers, bright neon colors, high speed space ships coupled with its anime influenced characters makes this a rather standout game comparatively. The game aimed to be a revival of Silpheed, a top down SHMUP & while it is certainly not alive today, it apparently got enough sales in Japan to receive the Xbox 360’s ‘Platinum Hits’ tag. Fire up your Delta Saber, lock & load & let’s get on with this review.
The plot is… there. You follow newbie pilot sigh Katana Faraway, which despite his edgy name is largely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, it is all about a full scale futuristic galactic war between the Terra Central Government & the ADAN Alliance. Independence is the gist of it all & you are just a soldier doing his job. Needless to say the story is not all that amazing by today’s standards though probably a step up from games of the same genre.
While the plot is not outstanding, visually the game sports some pretty good looking, animated & voice-acted cutscenes, with some caveats of course. For starters cutscenes suffer from that minimalist deal that most consoles games of that generation did to manage resources, it does a pretty decent job at hiding its flaws much like F.E.A.R hid its rather empty hallways with excellent lighting & its mediocre enemy AI with constant call-outs of their actions. A major flaw to the cutscenes being the blurryness, that once again, consoles at the time tended to suffer with. Thankfully you won’t have to sit through many. Voice acting wise, it s a whole lot better than I expected though some lip syncing issues are present. During space combat, details tend to blend in with the background as well being set in space doesn’t help distinguishing the locations of enemies without the usage of the lock-on. On the other hand the crazy light trails fighter ships leave behind added to the chaotic mess of air combat. Performance wise, the handles a fair amount of enemies, both big & small, on-screen pretty well with only noticeable framerate drops when you are dropping 10+ bombs onto a battleship while being inches from it. But of course, that is to be expected.
Now then, the combat & everything else. Space combat is pretty much the meat of the game with customization being a close 2nd. Once you start you will be dropped straight into combat in basically what amounts to giant arenas set in space. Word of warning, the being dropped part is serious, you will not get any sort of tutorial in the main game so taking a few minutes to do the optional tutorial in the main menu will save some headaches & explains some basics. Missions involve shooting X amount of enemies, escorting giant battleships or defending them for X amount of time. All for the most part manageable & fun enough to keep you going, especially with the constant updates, chats & banter plus the chaos on screen keeping on immersed. If you’ve played any other flight sim game, movement is much the same & easy to pick up if you haven’t. Things to set it apart is having both a Armor & Shield bar. Armor being your non-regenerating health, which once depleted means game over & the Shield acting as you regenerating health plus fueling some special abilities, for example Afterburners, meaning you can squeeze out a little more ‘oopmh’ out of your engines or a slight slo-mo ability in which your ship automatically shoots all available weapons for a limited time. All in all, it is an interesting risk/reward system though I did not particularly make heavy use of the other abilities outside of the Afterburners.
All the fancy maneuvering in the world won’t help you take down a giant spaceship, in which case extreme fire power will do the thing. The Delta Saber might be relatively small but it can carry an arsenal to rival the battleships you have to face. Being able to carry up to 3 weapons, anything ranging from conventional machine gun to lasers to bombs & anti-ship missiles the Delta Saber is a versatile little ship. Customization is key to surviving the onslaught of enemies. Weapons are given through progressing in the story or bought using points received at the end of missions for clearing the mission, destroying enemies, etc. There’s a fair amount of choices to unlock to help you deal with the game.
Negatives to the game, some rather heavy difficulty jump on the last few missions but for those that cannot manage them, the game is gracious enough to provide a level skip if you fail a few times. Another thing of note are the mission timers are arbitrary in some missions, you never know how much time you have left until your partner chimes up & starts rushing you to finish. This aspect I found annoying as I did not feel as I had as much freedom as one would expect from a flight sim. This kind of ties to the secret sub-quests, which are generally revealed through the banter, which is cool but again, you really are hard pressed to get 1 or 2 in the time allotted.
The game has some free DLC which adds access to online leaderboards & a few extra missions which unlock some weapons & of course are an extra challenge in of themselves. The game also offers NG+ by default for you to do it all over again.
All in all, Project Sylpheed is an interesting flight sim with some flaws but is an overall enjoyable game. It can probably be found for cheap at used game stores which is good enough for the 8 or so hours of high action & explosions in deep space.
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