If you’re someone who grew up without symbols in their everyday alphabet, those little markings can make all the difference in how you read a word. I studied Spanish throughout high school, and it was always a thrill to write aquí or español, which goes to show you both how boring and nerdy I am was. Writing a lot more kanji nowadays, I don’t always get a chance to embrace my love of accents, tildes and other markings, but I never lose my appreciation for the umlauts. Maybe that colors my perception of things a bit too much. Maybe I loved Rammstein because performing Bück dich got them arrested in my home state. But in any case, the fact that a side scrolling shmup with heavy sci-fi elements, a bitching soundtrack and brutal gameplay just happens to be riddled with umlauts may correlate to my bias. Let’s dive into Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer.

Like all great apocalyptic tales, Söldner-X takes place in a future where an unknown, dark force has infected and destroyed humanity as we know it. The remaining resistance wants to finally quash the tide of evil once and for all and, hopefully, give the remains of Earth a fighting chance for the future. None of that really matters to you, because you’re a damn mercenary who just wants a paycheck. Sure, you’re being hired by the “good guys” to fight the “bad guys,” but the main takeaway is that you can afford to put another down payment on your ‘04 Civic this month, so woop-dee-doo. There’s a bunch of stuff that’ll happen which will inform you of your greater purpose, the secrets behind the opposition, et cetera, but let’s not get taken in a tidal wave of righteous cause: focus on shooting bad guys and putting bills in the bank.

I’ll be perfectly blunt: Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer isn’t reinventing the wheel when it comes to horizontal shooters. You’ve got your ship, you’ve got a health bar, and you’ve got a ton of mobs out in front that need to get a bullet to the nose cone. You start with a couple of weapons that you can toggle between, plus some limited pickup rockets, and each weapon has an energy bar that gradually runs down as you blast away and can be recharged through cooldown or picking up powerups from enemies. Eventually, you’ll unlock more weapons, you’ll find secret keys that’ll unlock extra stuff at the end of the game, and you simply need to keep shooting each and every thing that moves on the screen that isn’t you. You’ve played R-Type, you’ve got the basics down before you even pick up the controller.

Additionally, the mechanics themselves are interesting but not entirely groundbreaking. There’s a chain reaction situation where comboing weapons into themselves creates a stronger shot and builds towards “berserker mode,” where you can unleash on the enemy, for a limited time, with untold destruction. It’s very cool to see when you pull it off, but it’s also a little more difficult to activate successfully. This is because a lot of the weapons tend to have their ups and downs, and you’ll want to rely on select weapons inherently. The initial pulse, for example, has the most consistent firepower and upgrades well, but a later weapon, the bow, seems erratic and not able to deal damage as successfully. Yet, if you want that sweet chain reaction bonus, you need to be ready to change guns at the drop of a hat, even to the detriment of your damage.

Even then, once you unlock the different weapons that become available to you over the course of the expedition, you’ll still have the most success and enjoyment from merely picking the same couple and rotating between them. Very early on, you’ll understand the destructive power of the Rocket, and after that the game’s main strategy for big battles is over. You just need to survive through waves and literal asteroid fields to get to the end point of each stage, and then make sure you don’t whiff when it comes to firing off the powerful, one shot ammunition. As long as you have the mental facilities to take your foot off the gas, line up your shot and make it right, you can usually deal with everything in the whole game in two cycles: shoot nonstop for 85%, be patient for 3%, continue blasting for the remaining 12%.

However, let’s put all that aside for a moment. I started off this article talking about my ability to be won over by the right kind of aesthetic that capitalized on special letters, and Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer brings more to the table than a dope looking title. FIrst off, the devs have really managed to capture a world where the name of the game hits STRONGLY will the overall visual appearance. Start in a dystopian city scape with erosion and danger, get flung into a jungle rife with bestial insanity, hurtle into outer space where the asteroids are unforgiving and plunge into an ice world that seems both desolate and majestic. Too often, horizontal shooters turn into very bland affairs, but the visuals almost threaten to overwhelm the onscreen action in terms of variety and presentation.

Moreover, the bosses look fantastic. After a couple of titles where I was pretty disappointed by the reveal of the stage big bads, it was refreshing to see a game where thought and consideration was really put into what a “boss” might be. Start off simple, multi-stage tank that also summons squadrons of smaller ships. Move onto things like giant drill ships, undulating mechanical serpents, spinning scythe ships and more. Söldner-X isn’t looking to blow your mind with audacious concepts, but everything you see feels in vein with the tone and the atmosphere of the game overall, and is delivered with amazingly smooth animations to keep them more interesting than the average mob. While they might not always be hard (save your rockets, kids!), they were always a delight in the reveal and the sheer power that was projected by what they represented.

Possibly most importantly is the soundscape of Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer. As you might imagine, a project of this sort is carefully crafted aurally, with a deeply thrumming electronic soundtrack meant to capture the post industrial feel of the early 2000s. The beats and constant onslaught of heavy sound put you in the “metal but not metal” mentality, which is so important for a game that ultimately works out to just over an hour. The rhythm is not relentless, but ducks nicely between segments when areas, biomes and elemental differences appear, allowing an incredible flow between moments and situations. Additionally, the whole experience is shot through with voices in your ears of the resistance, yelling sometimes incomprehensibly and maddening things like “Are you crazy? Good! I knew I liked you” to really drive home the “this is basically a suicide mission” motif.

I wish I could say more good things about Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer, but the fact is that it’s an arcade style shmup with a good amount of replay as long as you get into the vibe and potentially the storyline. If you bounce off that, you’ll never let the game hook you in a solid way. But if you’re ready to put your critical thinking skills on pause and not consider a lot of what’s happening in terms of story (really? Only a bounty hunter was available?), then you have some awesome graphics, fun blasting and a killer soundtrack to round out a really solid package from EastAsiaSoft. The only reason I would say not to play this game is if you hate anti-heroes, and even then you can dismiss that within seconds of getting into the cockpit. Why not just go shoot aliens for a bit? It’s a great way to spend the afternoon.

Graphics: 8.0 I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, but there was something truly majestic about seeing a game that looked even better on the Switch than it did in stills. The unfurling of the arenas, the bosses and the explosions was captivating and satisfying.	Gameplay: 6.0 The chain system for the weapons is a novel idea but flawed due to limitations. The rocket does all the dirty work for you in key moments. At the end of the day, it’s a shmup with a couple extra dance steps you don’t need to exercise.
Sound: 8.0 Somewhere between Portishead and Kraftwerk, I found a fantastic throughline of electronic darkness that made the adventure worthwhile in the most aural of nature.	Fun Factor: 8.0 Given how burned out I’ve been on gamging in general, it was really nice to have something that was distracting and fun, without just being addicting for itch scratching sake. Why not come blast allong?
Final Verdict: 7.5

Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer was provided by the publisher.