Shantae: Half-Genie Hero Review PS VITA

Shantae is one of the most beloved platformer games because it is incredibly fun to play. Now, it is about as old as Game Boy Color and has recently been shifting on to consoles via ports. For instance, PlayStation4 contains a port for Shantae: Risky’s Revenge which was released a while ago in 2010.
But anyway let’s get on with the review starting with…

Story
The story of Shantae is essentially about the character, Shantae, who is half-human, half-genie, and works as a Guardian Genie to a small town, defending it against threats like invasions. But one night, she has a vision of the Genie Realm facing imminent danger and in the following days, loses her job and suffers a host of other losses as she draws closer to danger threatening the magical realm of her mother.

Gameplay
This game uses a side-scrolling platform with combat elements included and is pretty consistent with its predecessors. All of your navigation, uncovering of secrets, fighting enemies etc. is done side-scrolling. As you continue, events in the story will lead you to your present objective. You can explore such objectives through the town or the levels in the world at large where you will encounter bosses and enemies. Your town is essentially your home base of operations.

Controls
The game is not compatible with PSTV by default. The controls however, are quite easy. The way you move around is either with the D-Pad or Left Analog Stick. Use the triggers or circle button to fire away whatever magic you have selected. And now about the face buttons. Use X to jump and Square for physical assault. The Circle launches magic attacks and Triangle makes you dance and switch forms.

That is about as simple as it gets. Oh, just one more thing. Select enables you to trade equipped spells without needing to refer the menu first.

Presentation
The presentation is indeed one of the great strong points of this game. There is no debating that visually, this is a pretty stunning game. There is a rich diversity of colors to all of the areas and the models have been made to look quite clean and refined. This game is just festooned with beautiful details like for example, the actively-moving elements contained in the background of every level.

And after assaulting eyes with the visual feast, it sets about your ears. The theme song, ‘Dance Through The Danger,’ is an enchanting track, especially with its feminine vocals. The in-game music is also a perfect match that complements the main theme as well as the whole gaming experience.

The performance of Half Genie hero is pretty decent, running at 60fps on Vita. However, the fps rate does drop marginally when there is an explosion. It will still stay well above 30fps, so really, you could not complain.

The loading time is pretty good too. It is very unlikely to take longer than 5 seconds, which is a massive relief no matter what mood you are in.