With a setting closer to RPGs than shooters, Sol Divide presents a medieval fantasy world threatened by the tellingly titled Evil Army and its leader, King Eftar. (I suppose “Lord Bad” is copyrighted elsewhere.) Standing against Eftar are the balanced warrior Vorg, the faster, weaker, and centuries-old sorceress Tyora, and the slower, stronger winged lancer Kashan. That's all the story you'll see, at least in the North American version of Sol Divide. More on this later.

Though it's not readily apparent in the game's design, Sol Divide was programmed by Psikyo, the makers of such shooter series as Strikers 1945 and Gunbird. As one of their few side-scrollers, Sol Divide presents relatively short stages, most of which end with a boss encounter. In keeping with the fantasy theme, players face knights, wizards, serpents, those tenacious skeletons, and stranger varieties of Dungeons and Dragons archetypes.

I'm actually hard pressed to think of a comparison for Sol Divide's gameplay, which takes a standard side-scrolling shooter concept and adds up-close melee strikes and the use of magical spells such as fire lances, thunder bombs, freezing swathes of ice, and so forth. Projectile and hand-to-hand attacks are unlimited, but the arcane arts are gauged by a regenerating power meter, and the most powerful spells need the longest charging period. Of course, you can grab a number of drifting items to refill your life gauge or magic meter, so you're rarely without firepower.

While Sol Divide has a style less exaggerated than the usual big-eyed anime aura, the promise of the game's artwork is squandered on an ugly in-game appearance that resembles nothing so much as the digitized, computer-rendered look that was favored in games like Skeleton Warriors and Batman Forever during the mid-1990s. The fad was a brief one, and Sol Divide shows why; it makes for bland, pixelly, and unconvincing visuals.

Still, there's some nice play beneath the drab images, simply because Psikyo knows how to make a shooter. The enemy patterns and bosses of Sol Divide are enough to test your bullet-evasion skills, and the game's continue feature doesn't roll over, so you'll either learn the right method or perish repeatedly on the same stage. Unfortunately, the structure isn't as tight as Gunbird 2 or other Psikyo shooters; your character is a bit too large to squeeze through enemy fire, and making an up-close attack leaves you wide open. This is one shooter in which a quick death can actually be blamed on unfair design choices.

And then there's the matter of the game's storyline, or the curious lack of it. In bringing the game to the American PlayStation, XS Games, or possibly their parent company of Take 2 Interactive, decided to forego translating the characters' dialogue and cut it entirely, except for an ending left in raw Japanese. It's a strange move, considering that an English arcade version of Sol Divide already exists. Granted, conventional wisdom tells us that a shooter shouldn't need something as inconsequential as a story, but in a title as bland as Sol Divide, it couldn't hurt. Without any driving plot, there's not much motivation to complete the game more than once, even with different characters and separate "arcade" and "original" modes.

For a mere ten bucks, Sol Divide is an unorthodox piece of shooter history and a nice memento of the Psikyo name, which, I'm afraid, now seems to be dead. But when stripped of its story and stricken with a dull appearance and clumsy play, it's not a particularly interesting or enjoyable shoot-'em-up. It's nice that Psikyo tried something different here, but the results are a reminder that experimentation often meets with mediocre returns.

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