Review by: Michael Stearns

Assault Suit Leynos 2 is the latest game in series of 2D mech games by a Japanese company called Masaya. It's the direct sequel of what came out over here as Target Earth on the Genesis, but they also made Assault Suit Valken, which Konami released over here as Cybernator on the SNES. Sadly, no one decided to pick up Leynos 2..

Leynos 2 has a lot of things going for it. It has nearly 50 different weapons, eight different mechs, and you have to earn them all as you go through the game. It has a nice "grading" system, sort of like NiGHTS, and the better a grade you get on a level, the more stuff you get, like weapons, armor, devices, and hopefully a new machine. The devices are sort of like Relics in Final Fantasy 3, you equip them to your mech and they modify it in some way, like make it faster, more power, or better stats. Different types of armor is available as you go through, and its capabilities are measured by three mysterious lines for (presumably) three different types of damages. These mysterious lines would not be so mysterious if I could read Japanese, that I'm sure of. The configuration screens are all in English, so anybody can get through them.

Anyway, I got Leynos 2 because I was hoping it might tide me over until Nextech made a sequel to Ranger-X. Ranger-X was one of my all-time favorite Genesis titles. But I should have known, Leynos and Ranger-X are WAY different. For one thing, the levels in Leynos 2 are short and pretty dull.. That is, the *terrain* is pretty dull, you won't get bored because there's a constant supply of enemies firing tons of ammo at you. The levels are pretty flat and straight forward. Ranger-X on the other hand, concentrated more on sneaking through interesting, "rough" terrain, without attracting too much attention. You never get that feeling in Leynos 2, the enemy knows you're there and they aren't exactly sitting on their thumbs. This is partially because it's a full-scale war, and you've always got a few buddies running around too. This adds to the feeling of being "involved" in something big, but it would really help if your friends actually did something useful besides fly around and look cool.

Another problem is that all the mechs are big and slow, and some are REAL ugly. Ranger-X, these guys are not. Of course, there may be some cool, flighty ones later on. Actually, there are. The last machine I got (Still need three more) is called Galliver, and it has some really nice flying capabilities. It'll just take you forever to get. Words do not describe the coolness that is Galliver. If you've ever seen Robotech, I have three words for you: Quadrono Power Armor. On steroids. This guy's so fast you can't touch him. (Incidentally, it's also the fourth enemy you fight in the arena in level 3...) And when you get the LX-900000 Laser, all hell just breaks loose as you rip through EVERY ENEMY IN SIGHT IN SECONDS!!!! Oh, he's also one of the ugly ones. But we can't always be superficial.

Oh, which reminds me, the sound.. The music in this game is pretty good. In fact, it's all pretty good. It's pretty darn good. Now that I think about it, I really like it a lot. It's all fairly unobtrusive music that fits into the background for most stages, often easily drowned out by the sounds of bullets and lasers. The only problem with the music is that the coolest tracks in the game are only played in the Arena, and they don't last very long because fights there tend to go pretty fast. There's no sound test, but a lot of the music, including the nice arena tunes, are recorded on the CD.

I suppose I should talk about the gameplay too. As I said above, the play is pretty "heavy." You can jump, walk, dash, fly, and fire in just about any direction. But you get the feeling you are controlling something really heavy. The flight for some of the heavier machines is practically useless, except that they can barely jump, so if you want to gain any altitude at all you'll have to. Unless of course, you're playing as Galliver. He's fast and flighty, his booster meter will last for a very long time. Aiming your weapons is a little hard, because you can fire in so many directions, but if you turn on the auto-aiming it's not such a problem. Except then you might be aiming at an enemy far away, when one pops up right in your face and you can't change targets quickly enough. You can also equip shields and force fields for blocking some attacks. The control is 100% reconfigurable while in a level, you can even switch to back up weapons if you run out of ammo. Each button is assigned a weapon, except for the jump/booster button and the auto-aiming button. Those you have to keep, but you can assign them to any button you like. the game is VERY playable. It takes a while to get used to the control, but it's a lot of fun. Not as much fun as Ranger-X, people like me would be quick to point out. But it's still cool, and hey, some people *gasp!* didn't like Ranger-X??? The sacrilege!!! Also, once you beat it the first time, you can go through it again in a harder mode with all the stuff you earned the first time through, although you can't gain anything extra the second time.

Also, this is just me being nitpicky, but when you cough up the extra bucks for an import game, you can usually expect cool manual art, character design, and that lovely import game smell. Mmmm..... The manual is pretty nice (Considering I can't read any of it) and you get some neat SD Assault suit pics, but the character design (the human pilots) look like they came out of some scary Image comic. Inflated super-hero chests and skin-tight outfits, yuck. But don't worry, the packaging still smells nice.

A few other little problems include the opening FMV. It's full screen, and not as pixelly as some, but it seems poorly produced. It's mostly just a camera swinging around some big polygons. At the end it gets sort of cool, but then it's over. Also, the ending that I got (I'm sure there's a better one if you're good enough) was really pretty bad, although there was a neat Japanese song during the credits. And (this is the big one) you can't delete save data without wiping out all of it. There are three save slots, but you can't delete them in the game, as far as I know. So you have to go into the Saturn's internal memory and delete the whole file, and start the game over again. Too bad.

I might mention though, that this game is NOT for everybody. I don't know anyone who didn't like it, but you might want to be sure it's what you want before you get it. I could see people not liking it real easy. Whenever I see a new game that I want, I always think, "damn, why'd I buy that Leynos 2 game??" But if I go back and play it again, I'm immediately reminded how much fun it really is, and am glad to have it. On the highly unoriginal scale of one to ten, I give this game .. an 8! ooh, how exciting!