About Border Down, like I wrote in another thread, it's one of the best horizontal shmups I've played in a long, long time. It has all I expect from a good arcade shooter, smooth gameplay, easy to get into yet hard to master, a decent number of levels/areas, high replay value and good scoring opportunities.
BD delivers old school class with today's technology, and that's one of the main reasons for me to love it. The weapon system is straight-forward, which seems to be a common thing in today's shmups.
Every one of the six levels is divided into three zones, the so-called Borders, green, yellow and red. The Borders represent the different flight pathes of your imaginary team of ships, and your number of ships left. You start in the green Border and if you die, you go a Border Down, if you die again after reaching the red Border, it's game over.
Every level has a scoring goal, If you reach or break it, you go Border Up and thus get an extra life, but in order to meet the scoring goals, you have to rack up quite a score in later levels. Your ship is equipped with a normal shot and a huge Break Laser that not only destroys enemy ships with ease but also deflects bullets - this is the core part of BD's scoring system.
Every bullet you eliminate with the laser becomes a score multiplier for the enemy ships you destroy. Say you deflect 10, then 50 and finally 100 bullets and you destroy three ships worth 500 points each during a continous Break Laser blast, you'll get 10x500 + 50x500 + 100x500 = 80,000 points for it alone.... now imagine what scores you can rack up if you manage to kill a boss with your laser while he spews out thousands of bullets... at the end of each level you also get a big bonus for every Break Laser multiplier point. Btw., the number of multiplier points will be shown on your VMU's display, a neat feature IMO... collecting multipliers and getting big Break Laser scores is addictive like crack I tell ya...
The later bosses are quite tough, impossible without knowing when and for how long to fire the Break Laser... there are other quite hard spots in the game but it's not unfair or anything.
Oh yeah, and the extras are very cool too, you can unlock extra ships, continues, one-life/scoring videos, etc.
GET IT. NOW.
