Gradius V Critic Reviews

Incredibly difficult and insanely enjoyable, Gradius V is one of those magical games that you can pick up and play instantly, but spend weeks mastering.

Combines best-of-class graphics with a surprisingly back-to-basics approach to the series' familiar gameplay. The result is a sublime shooter that not only does its legacy proud, but actually transcends it.

Players who are looking for one of the most charming, addictive, and challenging shooters to come along in a long while should waste little time in picking up Gradius V.

The perfect successor to Ikaruga and the space shooter genre for this PS2/Cube/Xbox age. The action is intense. The control is smooth. The game is screamingly difficult.

The star of the game is your own craft, the Vic Viper, which comes in four flavors. Each offers a similar set of basic upgrades – missiles, lasers, forcefield – each of the four types has slight differences in these upgrades.

Quite simply put; this is the finest horizontal shooter on the PlayStation 2. In fact, it’s the finest horizontal shooter on any of the next-generation systems to emerge in some time - a game that can sit proudly in the upper echelons of gaming excellence.

One of the best games I've played this year, and belongs in any former arcade rat's game library.

Balanced, tuned and counter-weighted to within a pixel’s distance of perfection, Treasure have masterminded a game both technically adept and visually astonishing. Revel in this pean to the art of destruction.

It's pretty, it's accessible, it has a nicely-balanced difficulty level (hard, and frequently quite hard, but practically never unfairly so), and it doesn't hurt that Konami's asking only 30 bucks.

The action creeps up slowly, starting out like a gorgeous-looking but fairly standard shoot 'em up. However, by the middle of level two, it's pummelling you with a relentless parade of conceptual set pieces so audacious and inventive you'll laugh with delight as you gape in horror.

Unless you’re a shooting god, it’ll be a while before you beat this… and even then, once you do, you’ll unlock lots of new ways to play it all over again.

And while previous games like "Silpheed" and "R-Type Final" are both excellent games, there is something about the style and the legacy associated with the Gradius franchise that makes Gradius V a force to be reckoned with.

Sporting incredible visuals and gameplay incredibly similar to the older Gradius games, a Gradius fan or even just a casual Shmup fan should love this.

With just the main game and the Score Attack mode, it's a bit short on play options; however, for what it does offer, you get a lot of game for just $30. If you're into this type of game or if you have even a remote interest in space shooters, you need to buy this game.

The production values are excellent, and the simplistic gameplay is classic and at the core of so many old games as well as those new today.

Gradius V may not reinvent the wheel that is the space shooter, but it refines it to near perfection. This is a title that no serious gamer should miss.

Despite the game's incredibly high difficulty level (that sometimes borders on the frustrating); the intricately designed levels, sumptuous aesthetics and razor sharp gameplay will constantly pull you back, until all you can live for is annihilating your previous high score.

Even with only seven levels, which are huge, it will take even the best shooter fan quite a few tries to complete this one to the end.

It's a short but sweet experience and unquestionably worth the effort to fight from the beginning to the end. Just don't expect to get very far on the first couple of plays.

The graphics are stunning and the enemy and boss patterns will have you laughing with delight at their ingenuity and hand/eye stimulation...This one's not to be missed.