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This is a straightforward vertical shooter which features a smooth graphical engine, a short digital sound track and various types of enemies. There are two types of ships, each with its own weapon types, as well as missile upgrades (homing as well as regular, more powerful ones), bombs and shield. The shareware version of Baryon features only one level, but the registered version promises more action-packed levels with more enemy types. The graphics are great and very detailed. The assortment of enemy vehicles, the backgrounds, and the textured landscape are superbly rendered. The music and sound are very good. It's one of the most visually appealing shooting games in its time, with tons of special effects, neat details and whole screens full of explosions. There is a price to pay for the furious presentation, though, as Baryon runs in a weird (for VGA, anyway) 256x200 screen mode, and not all graphics card handle it equally well. The overall presentation is just stellar, even excelling the contemporary genre reference Raptor: Call of the Shadows, with which it also shares similar aesthetics. Game mechanics are completely different, though. As an uncompromising arcade action fest, it does without any of the management elements of its competitor and concentrates on plain and simple shooting. There are two ships with different weapon systems, which can of course be manned by two players simultaneously. There's not much to the upgrade system, as its just two main and secondary weapons each, besides the obligatory smart bombs. It's strength, however, lies in its functionality, and there's no such thing as a useless choice. Stages are rather long, but there's always so much going on that they hardly ever get boring. Only the bosses are a bit disappointing, some of them even ridiculously easy, at least on the slowest setting. One of them literally just sits there waiting to be destroyed after all its weapon systems are obliterated. In place of selectable difficulty modes, it lets the player set the speed the game runs in, from almost slow motion to literally inhumanly fast. By default, the game is almost easy to beat. It is also more forgiving than most Korean PC shmups, despite the strict limitation to 4 credits. Still, even though it is not too much of a chore to eliminate the enemies, players aiming for high scores are pressed to also catch the red diamonds dropped by certain enemy types, which more often than not lead into own set death traps. |
