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High-Voltage software has already wowed us with their 3D engine tech demo, and made us drool with their announcement and gameplay trailer from the upcoming 3D shooter the Conduit, but today they have something else entirely for you on Nintendo’s WiiWare channel. That game is Gyrostarr.

Gyrostarr is a 3D shoot them up that has you racing through plasma tracks killing bad guys and collecting plasma to unlock the next level. You can think of this game a s a mash up of the old school arcade game tempest mixed with some N2O for the trippy visuals and WipeOut meets F-Zero for the insane speed. That my friend is a good mix in my books.

Gyrostarr’s 50 levels have you hurtling your ship down winding plasma tracks blasting the enemy spacecraft whilst you pick up power-ups and plasma balls to charge the gates that will take you to the next level or bonus round. The tracks have a series of lanes that you occupy similar to Tempest as mentioned earlier that you shoot down or collect your power-ups in. Enemies will also travel down these lanes, but as you get further in the game the lanes start to mean less and less to them as they will constantly be moving in and out.

The man goal in each level is the same, stay alive and collect enough plasma to fill the bar at the top of the screen. Your current level goal is displayed by the first white ring on the bar. Your current position in the level is shown by the grey ring that travels along the bar. If the grey ring reaches you your level goal before you’ve collected enough plasma to fill the bar, the game will end when you reach it. In later levels this is compounded by the fast that you’ll start to die a lot, each time sapping some of your collected plasma away. It gets hectic.

Once you’ve collected enough plasma to fill the bar to the first ring you can continue collecting plasma to fill the bar fully or just focus on building your score. If you fill the level bar fully you’ll unlock a bonus round. Bonus rounds have you hurtling down an enemy free track just collecting plasma to fill your bar with the speed increasing constantly. Some may find this lack of enemies jarring at first, but once you’ve gone through a few gates and have really ramped up your speed all is forgotten. If you manage to fill your bar in the bonus round you’ll bring a bit of the collected energy to the next level making your goal easier to attain.

High-Voltage has given you a plethora of control modes for your ship. You can play with your WiiMote sideways like a NES controller, play with just a Nunchuck or even use the classic controller. There is a motion control mode that allows you to control your ship by tilting the WiiMote, but I wouldn’t recommend it. When playing multiplayer you can even share a WiiMote/Nunchuck pair between 2 people making for one of the coolest control modes I’ve seen so far on the Wii.

Gyrostarr ships with a full co-op multiplayer mode where up to four players can jump into the game to take on the levels at the same time. Each player has their own score so you can play this mode competitively, but the rub is that you get more powerful when you mix your shots by occupying the same lane to produce some mega shots. For me things started we, but quickly devolved into a steal the power-up match that turned out to be almost as much fun as playing the game normally. This was and is a great party game.

With 50 levels of crazy speed and a full multi-player mode it’s hard to believe that Gyrostarr is only 700 Wii points making it one of the best values on the WiiWare channel. If you have the points and like shooters do yourself the favour and pick this game up. It’s worth cleaning out the Wii fridge for.

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