In retrospect, having "arcade" in the name should have been a big hint.

For some months now, Syder Arcade has been sitting in my backlog, my only exposure to the game being its incredible soundtrack. (Seriously, it's a great arrangement of Halo- and Mass Effect-like swells, and more schmup-style high-energy beats. It's really good.) I hadn't given the game itself a real try until now. And ... well. While the presentation is certainly impressive, between the (great!) soundtrack and some surprisingly high-quality graphics, the game itself really isn't something I can get excited about.

Syder Arcade incorporates a neat mixture of shoot-em-up twists, specifically different categories of weapon pickups (ala Raiden), a fixed free-roamable arena, and some light StarFox-like mission variety including some escort and protection objectives. But at its heart, it hews closest to bullet-hell chaos, with explosive bullets and missiles and enemy spawns and all kinds of shit just running amok all over the place. The campaign becomes a hectic bullet-dodging mess by the third mission. ... Granted, the campaign is only six missions long, but that brevity is just another thing I'd complain about.

Also, at least with all the modern, high-powered graphics settings turned up, I found projectile effects sometimes difficult to differentiate from shiny background art. Not that I would necessarily have performed better even if I could have clearly seen all the bullets. But it's still not great.

The short campaign and difficulty curve - and, yeah, the title of the game I guess - make it clear that this is an arcade-styled game, oriented around high-speed action and high score challenges. And I'm just not interested in that stuff.

But I still love this soundtrack!

Progress: Almost finished the third campaign mission.