Sol Cresta review – shooting for the moon

metro.co.uk:

The creator of Devil May Cry and Bayonetta indulges his love of 2D shooters with a new sequel to a peculiarly obscure franchise.

It seems a long, long time since we’ve played a new PlatinumGames title. They’ve always been one of our favourite studios and while they have had the odd dud they’ve also been responsible for all-time classics as Bayonetta and NieR:Automata, as well as other great action titles such as Vanquish and Astral Chain. The latter, from 2019, was their last big budget release, before they began to focus on self-publishing and vowed never again to work on a game that they didn’t own the rights to.

That change of direction is no doubt the reason for the lack of recent releases, with their grand return being… a sequel to an obscure 2D shooter that they don’t own the rights to.

To be fair, this is clearly a passion project for Bayonetta and Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya, who has always proclaimed himself to be a fan of 2D shooters. The Cresta franchise, by the now defunct Nichibutsu, started with 1980’s Moon Cresta and continued with 1985’s Terra Cresta (nominally the most ‘famous’ one of the series) and then a confusing series of pseudo-sequels and spin-offs. Which makes Sol Cresta the fourth or fifth entry, depending on how you look at it.

We’re not sure whether Platinum expects anyone to have ever heard of the Cresta games before, but the bizarre way in which Sol Cresta was first announced, where the unveiling was implied to be an April Fool gag, makes the whole situation very hard to read. Especially as Platinum later realised the marketing faux pas and had to start explaining to everyone that they were only joking about the April Fool and actually it was a real game after all. All we can say is we