So Sigma Star Saga DX is basically a game of two halves. The exploration side plays a lot like a traditional adventure game in the vein of The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. You wander around from a top down perspective, gradually making your way through different planets and spaceships while unlocking upgrades in the form of “tools” that open up new paths and abilities. Naturally, this also means engaging in everybody’s favourite videogame pastime: backtracking.

Combat on foot is pretty naff here. For a good chunk of the game you’re stuck with what can only be described as a glorified peashooter, and most encounters boil down to awkwardly shuffling out of danger while holding the fire button for a few seconds. This version does improve things slightly thanks to the increased movement speed, which was one of the bigger complaints about the original release, but even once you unlock a few extra ways to dish out damage, combat never really becomes enjoyable. It’s something you tolerate rather than look forward to.

Now, while you’re busy jogging back and forth across planets, the lovely little parasite the Krill have attached to Ian will occasionally detect a distress signal from one of the many ships flying around overhead. If trouble’s brewing, you’re immediately teleported aboard a random spacecraft and thrown into the game’s other half: the shmup combat. Yes, these are essentially the random battles, and despite the supposedly “adjusted” encounter rate, the game still yanks you out of your shoes and into space combat pretty regularly.

The ship sections are your standard horizontal shoot ’em up affairs, think R-Type or Gradius, just with a few twists thrown in to make things a little stranger. As you destroy enemies, you gain experience that boosts both your health and firepower, giving the stages a slight sense of progression beyond simply surviving. Some encounters ask you to wipe out a certain number of enemies before you can leave, while others just throw a chunkier enemy at you and call it a day. For the most part, these are fairly simple stages, which makes sense considering they make up the bulk of the game’s combat.

The third type of stage is closer to a traditional shmup level, complete with actual set pieces and a boss fight waiting at the end. Unfortunately, those bosses are usually pretty underwhelming, which is a shame because the buildup often makes them feel like they should be far more exciting than they actually are. If you’re someone who lives for those brutal, quarter devouring bullet hell games, Sigma Star Saga DX will probably leave you wanting more, even if some of its ideas are genuinely clever.

For starters, every ship dies in one hit, which sounds terrifying until you realise the game also gives you a health bar instead of traditional lives, because apparently committing to either system was simply too straightforward. Then there’s the shot customisation, which is easily one of the coolest ideas in the game. By finding “shot chips” during the exploration sections, you can completely alter your weapon behaviour, creating shots that change direction with your movement, spread across the screen, or even leave damaging bubbles floating behind them. Screen clearing bombs are also available, though naturally you’ll need to hunt those down during exploration too.

Sadly, what Sigma Star Saga DX ultimately delivers is a genuinely unique game where neither of its two wildly different halves is executed quite well enough to fully carry the experience. The adventure side feels fairly basic and is dragged down by weak combat, while the shmup sections, despite some interesting ideas, often come across as generic and awkwardly designed. On their own, neither side really has enough depth to stay consistently enjoyable for long stretches.

The bigger issue is how often the game forces these shoot ’em up sections on you. Back in the 16 bit era, you could get away with tossing in a quick shmup segment as a fun little distraction before moving on. Here, though, the mechanic is absolutely central to the game; the cracks are hard to ignore.

Visually, Sigma Star Saga DX has been touched up here and there, but it still very much looks like a Game Boy Advance title, for better and worse. Thankfully, WayForward has always had a real talent for sprite work, and the on foot sections benefit the most from that. Character sprites are expressive, environments are colourful, and there’s a nice amount of charm packed into the world despite the hardware limitations. Sadly, the shmup sections don’t fare quite as well visually.

Sigma Star Saga DX is a unique game, but unique does not automatically mean good. There are fun moments throughout the adventure, and the added quality of life improvements certainly help smooth over some of the original game’s rougher edges, but when you look at the overall package, it’s still an awkward, albeit ambitious, experiment that never quite balances its two clashing ideas properly.