Unfortunately, what Sigma Star gets right is ultimately weighted against what it gets wrong.
The game starts with your character and his squadron of generically brave and daring fighters defending the planet from the evil alien bad guy ships by shooting them repeatedly in the face. While doing this, your entire squad gets wiped out, and you’re the only survivor. Surprise! You get sent to infiltrate the aliens, things happen, and you end up conflicted about your loyalties. The story is weak, and sends you to generic environments, such as fire. It’s all been done before, so that’s obviously not where the draw is.
The gameplay is rpg-ish, and works in a random encounter system to ship combat. Every once and a while you will be wisked away to a random ship and be forced to kill a specific number of bad guys. By killing the enemies you get experience, and eventually level up, making yourself ripped.
In addition to the rpg system, there’s also a really nifty weapon system, which allows you to collect different weapon types, such as the impact type, or the direction it fires, and combine three of them to make a really cool weapon. Some weapons are obviously better than others, but there isn’t a “right” combination.
The good part is the combat, and if there was one thing to get right, it would be that, because you will be fighting a crap ton. There isn’t a way to avoid being sucked into random encounters, and you’ll need to explore a great deal of the maps to find your objectives, so you’ll be constantly fighting and getting bored of the experience.
Thankfully the amount of time needed to finish the game is exactly at the point where you’ll be tempted to stop playing. You’ll have no desire to play the game ever again, so the replay value is pretty weak.
The sound is pretty average, nothing exceptional here, and the graphics are the same.
Your enjoyment of the game rests substantially on how much you enjoyed old school side scrolling games like Raiden, which is unfortunate because this game could have been a lot better with just a little more Q and A.