Soldier Blade

Soldier Blade closes out Hudson's console-side Star Soldier lineage. Released for the PC Engine in July 1992 and for the TurboGrafx-16 that September, it is a vertically scrolling shooter on a machine that had no shortage of them, and it remains one of the easiest to recommend to someone who does not read Japanese.

Seven stages, all of them fast. Weapon type is chosen by colour: grab a red, blue or green capsule and your ship reconfigures, with a spread pattern and a piercing laser among the options. The clever part is the reserve. Up to three extra power-ups stack in a box at the edge of the screen, and you can dump them at any moment as a heavy screen-clearing attack. The same stock doubles as your health, since a hit costs you stored power instead of killing you outright. That one design choice makes the game noticeably kinder than its contemporaries without draining the tension out of it.

What has aged best is the rhythm. Enemies arrive in legible formations, the scroll never stalls, and bosses telegraph clearly enough that a death almost always feels like your own mistake rather than an ambush. The soundtrack is among the best work on the hardware. Alongside the main campaign there are two-minute and five-minute Caravan modes, the Japanese score-attack format where you squeeze the highest total out of a fixed time limit, and that is where most of the game's long-term life sits.

It runs straight in the browser, so no emulator setup is needed, though a gamepad is strongly advised because the late-stage dodging is awkward on a keyboard. Reviews at the time were lukewarm and complained that it did nothing new, which is true and no longer matters much. Soldier Blade is not inventive; it is simply a well-built, well-paced shooter that does not waste your time, and thirty years later that counts for more than novelty did.