[REVIEW] Sigma Star Saga DX

An intriguing story in a compelling sci-fi world with genre-mixing gameplay held back by outdated technical limitations. A hybrid side-scrolling space shooter and top-down action adventure brought to modern platforms twenty years after its original release with bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements. Most narrative progress happens in the top-down adventure on a series of planets and space stations. This is sort of a “Zelda-Lite”; there’s combat, exploration, traversal puzzles, secrets to find, and new abilities you gain as the story progresses that allow you to reach new places, but none of this is particularly complex. Puzzles and combat are both fairly trivial and the abilities are more key than tool, letting you pass specific obstacles rather than recontextualizing gameplay. The only real secrets or collectibles are varyingly-hidden “gun data” that can be used in the shooter segments. Those shooter segments come in two varieties: random encounters that interrupt the top-down…