The Secret to Success is Card Work: Syder Arcade

This is going to be a weird one just on the back of things not working out as expected. See, like many steam users, I've got too many games and many of those games come with cards. Cards are nice, since they sell for a dollar or two in total but they encourage me to idle games using a program that reports to steam the game is being played. But I like to lead a review with my play time and idling prevents that from being useful. And sometimes, I just don't really get grabbed by a game but I don't want to badmouth it either. It just goes on the back of the list.

Anyway the idea here was going to be - I would play a game til I got the card drops, then move onto a couple other titles with cards I probably won't get around to writing full reviews of. It's not as serious a process, but I could preface it as such! One problem: Syder Arcade appears to be too short to obtain all four of its card drops. I'm certainly willing to admit maybe I just missed a mode unlock or something, but eh, we'll get into it...

I have a real soft spot for side-scrolling shooty ship games and graphically this game is a joy to look at.  The engine is pretty smooth, the ships all look good, the characters (all four of them) look great during the little silly pseudo cutscenes and the enemy ship designs are visually pleasant. There's sort of a weirdness to how they seem to be two very distinct styles of design, but whatever I don't think thematic linking is all that necessary in a shmup. While I have a soft spot for spaceship bullet hell games I am not fundamentally any good at them - I might have been decent as a child, but I don't have the visual responsiveness necessary to be any good now. So I played through 'the campaign' on the 2nd up difficulty, which was a bit too easy in parts.

The art assets really shine on the HUD, it just looks quite nice to me and information comes readily. The game also does audio alerts and the announcer voiceovers are good, but not spammy. You fight some giant bug monster stuff and then descend to an ice planet, with a sort of mediocre boss fight...

Then, abruptly, the game just ... Ended? A little credit bit starts playing and one of my big issues with the game comes up - I can't quit the game! So it's just rolling along with these credits and I quickly tire of watching names, so I alt-f4 and flip through the campaign menu, realizing these are all just levels and not individual campaigns. Which is sort of a bummer. And seriously, I hit every button on my keyboard and gamepad. Is this an amiga reference? I have no idea.

The game does come with a survival mode, which I gave a couple tries to, but the fact of the matter is - to me anyway - the enemies are way too bullet spongey. So I'm basically focusing all of my efforts on dodging enemy fire, not really killing anything and then the screen is covered in enemy units. This works pretty nicely in the campaign since you end up dodging around against a limited number of foes, but in survival it reminds me of playing a RPG and wandering into a zone you're too low level to do. Just sitting there, plinking away ineffectively. Maybe that's something shmup lovers are big on, but it didn't work for me.

The music and audio clips are excellent - Well, I think one song wasn't so good, but I generally quite liked what was hitting my ears. The game also does this neat thing where you can flip directions and turn around, which is pretty neat in the campaign and again really unenjoyable in the survival stuff. Again I'm not sure if this is common as I haven't played so many shmups, but it's new to me.

So, to conclude, I liked the game and I was given it so I'm not fretting too much, but an hour of play time for $10 is probably too much. Maybe pick it up cheap, or maybe the devs will add some content later on? Hard to say and hard to recommend as such, but the complaint "there isn't enough" is not so bad a complaint when it ends with "because I wanted more!"