Review: Sol Cresta is Hideki Kamiya’s love letter to retro shoot ’em ups

videogameschronicle.com:

It’s still hard to tell whether Sol Cresta was really supposed to be an April Fool’s prank.

First announced on April 1st, 2020, PlatinumGames’ reveal was met with plenty of chuckles from retro fans, who praised the studio on the effort it had gone to to pretend that the long-retired Cresta shoot ‘em up series from the 80s and 90s was making a comeback.

And yet, at the time, many of these retro players (this writer included) followed up these loud chuckles with a quiet “actually, I’d quite like to see that”.

Lo and behold, here we are now nearly two years later, living in a world where Sol Cresta is a very real thing, and a very enjoyable thing at that.

If you’re counting spin-offs, Sol Cresta is the eighth game in the Cresta series, which began in the arcades in 1980 with Moon Cresta and seemingly ended in 1997 with Sega Saturn title Terra Cresta 3D. The game’s intro sequence gives a recap of the previous games’ plots, accompanied by footage of them, but you really don’t need to have any knowledge of the Cresta series to enjoy what’s on offer here.

Indeed, the plot will be so superfluous to most players that there’s no real need to pay attention to it at all, although there is an extra $10 DLC story mode (which wasn’t made available to us at the time of review) for those who do want to explore the lore.

Developed in partnership with Hamster Games – which specialises in re-releasing old arcade and Neo-Geo games on modern systems – Sol Cresta is very much inspired by the ‘90s era of vertical scrolling shoot ‘em ups. The game consists of seven stages littered with enemies and, as is the nature of the genre, gives players one obvious task: destroy anything that moves, and most things that don’t.

The central mechanic the Cresta