Arcade Archives Terra Cresta

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1-2 Alternating (Local), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Terra Cresta, the second title in the Cresta series, is a Shmup released in 1985 in arcades. This modern release sees the game coming to PlayStation 4 in 2015 and Nintendo Switch in 2018.

Terra Cresta abandons much of the gameplay of its predecessor, but does hold on to one key idea that the original game had, the multi-part ship. However, where the first game had each ship representing a different life, Terra Cresta makes them more like power-ups where you add their firepower to your own as you progress by shooting various points around a landing pad to send the ship part into the sky and then docking with it. from there, you can enjoy the increased firepower of the extra part you’ve added (though now with a bigger ship for enemies to aim at), or you can temporarily separate the pieces to spread out the firepower over a wider area, though this leaves your main ship vulnerable to attacks.

It’s a really clever game mechanic that I enjoy quite a lot, but it’s undone by this game’s extremely unforgiving difficulty, which has you lose all of your add-ons if you take a single hit, or just straight-up die if you take a hit when not connected to add-ons, starting again from nothing at a checkpoint. What’s more, your movement speed is much slower than some of the enemies that attempt to collide with you, and this game has no continues – lose your last life and you need to restart the game from the beginning.

This release of the game includes a new “Hi-Score Mode” that challenges players to score as much as they can in one run before seeing a game over screen. There is also a new “Caravan Mode” that does much the same, but with the limit being five minutes. In addition, this release of the game includes various display options, sound options, challenge modifiers, button mapping, and online leaderboards.

Overall, I really wanted to like Terra Cresta. Its reinterpretation of the multi-part ship concept introduced in Moon Cresta is really inspired here, but the unforgiving nature of the game’s difficulty means this is a game that I can only recommend to diehard fans of the Shmup genre.

tl;dr – Terra Cresta is a Shmup that re-imagines Moon Cresta’s multi-part ship mechanic in a way that’s really wonderful, but this game is sadly undermined by its nasty unforgiving difficulty. Unless you’re a fan of the genre who likes games painfully difficult, this is one to skip.

Grade: C-

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