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Nanostray 2 is a game I meant to pay more attention back when it was released, but Circumstances prevented it. Now seems like a decent enough time to go back, look at the title, and see how it did. Overall, it seems like a game that is going to please people who enjoyed the first Nanostray, but fails to improve any of the original's faults or bring anything new to the genre. It also seems to be a game that reviewers find unusually difficult, but classic shooters are on the whole a difficult genre and I'm honestly disappointed to see some "too hard" complaints cropping up.

Nanostray 2, as of right now, is sitting at a Metacritic rating of 74%, which isn't bad. It's not fantastic, but probably the best an old school vertical scrolling shooter for DS can hope for unless it manages to do something staggeringly brilliant. So what staggeringly brilliant thing did Nanostray 2 fail to pull off? Let's take a look at some review scores and see if there are any hints. For my part, I probably won't be playing Nanostray 2. The original didn't impress me, and I usually find it hard to get into shooters that don't build their gameplay around some sort of unorthodox gimmick (ala Ikaruga).

The high score came from Kombo, a relatively new gaming site with a lot of retro sensibility (the review text is even broken into compartments). There Nanostray 2 earned a respectable 8.5 score from review Jeff Rivera, who clearly understood and appreciated what the game was trying to achieve. He praised Nanostray 2 for sticking to the original's strengths while improving upon many of its weaknesses.

Right from the moment you start playing you're going to notice a huge leap forward from the original Nanostray in regards to presentation, graphics, sound, challenge, and gameplay. You're immediately given more game style options. You can play arcade mode, story mode, two-player mode, challenge mode, and simulation mode. Each of these modes changes up the formula significantly, which greatly adds to the game's overall value.

GamePro's Mike Spitalieri was also complimentary, scoring Nanostray 2 with a solid 4 out of 5. While many of Nanostray's reviews complained about the stiff difficulty, Spitalieri saw it as the saving grace of a good-looking game that otherwise suffered from uninspired level designs.

Unfortunately, for all the graphical polish, level design remains dry and uninspired. While we do give Shin'en points for integrating both vertical and horizontal scrolling, each level is basically a five-minute Death Star run punctuated by one mini-boss and one end boss, which becomes increasingly predictable. Thankfully, though, the ramped up difficulty keeps the game from growing stale too fast since unlimited continues have been vaporized. Also gone are the cheapskate difficulty levels which simply curtailed ships and continues for each setting. Nanostray 2 now employs real difficulty settings that impact gameplay, i.e. scrolling speeds increase and enemies' fire off more rounds and at a faster rate. In addition to the increased difficulty settings you'll also get a fair amount of replay value from challenges and unlockable simulators, essentially objective-based mini-games aimed at survival or hi-score hunting. Again, the level design won't raise any eyebrows but the nigh-impossible difficulty will definitely keep you locked on.

Gamespot awarded Nanostray 2 an equally solid 8 out of 10. The review's major complaint was unresponsive D-pad controls, but reviewer Chris Watters had nothing but love for the game's touchscreen controls and stiff difficulty.

Nanostray 2 offers two ways to control the movement of your ship, but you really only need one. The D pad is far too sluggish and imprecise to pull off the skin-of-your-teeth maneuvers that the game demands, so go with the touch screen. The action will play out on the touch screen so your ship will go where your stylus goes, and you can map the two attack buttons to either side of the DS depending on your preference. Stylus controls are precise and make finding those tiny pathways through fields of projectiles much easier, which goes a long way toward making the game easier to play for the unseasoned among you. The only drawback is the blind spots that the stylus and your hand will create as you hold them over the touch screen. But this doesn't prevent the controls from feeling sharp and well-implemented. And don't fret, vets, Nanostray 2 still brings the crazy, alone-in-a-sea-of-death challenge on harder difficulty settings.

Where Nanostray really took a drubbing from critics was in the print media, which had no sympathy for its classic shooter approach and no patience for the steeper difficulty curve. Although the text of the review is online, 1up's C+ score reflects a lot of this unforgiving attitude. Reviewer Ray Barnholt has no patience for the game's various shortcomings, and is especially displeased by a certain oversight in the overall game design.

You start Nanostray 2 by having to complete a handful of stages in any order you choose, and you're presented with a few more after that. By that point, however, you may have already spent most of your credits and lives, leaving you with just a couple of chances to get through every stage. Regardless, if you completely fail in this second tier at all, you get the final Game Over and are forced to restart the entire journey from planet one -- there's no "checkpoint" after completing the first set of planets.

That could be a minor complaint to some, but nonetheless, it sticks out the most: If progression is designed around two halves without a way to jump back to the halfway mark, why bother? In any other "old-school" action game, you're given one long string of stages, and if you screw up, you're knocked back to the start -- most players expect that. Nanostray 2 splits your journey for no real reason, except maybe to give a false sense of length or "hardcoreness." Neither feeling lasts very long.

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