Sine Mora Ex Review
by Omar (@siegarettes)
- Sine Mora Ex
- Developer- Digital Extremes,
Grasshopper Manufacture, Gyroscope Games
- Publisher- THQ Nordic
- PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Sine Mora was one of the most interesting shooters of the last generation. Interesting, in the way we reserve the word for games that have peaked our attention somehow, but don’t quite manage to get all the way there. Sine Mora EX returns to it, bringing a fresh coat of paint, small balance changes, and a few 2 player modes.
The enhanced graphics are the most noticeable change, with proper rendering and resolution options, instead of being tied to vague graphics presets in the original release. It brings out the detail in Sine Mora’s mechanical and environmental designs, allowing you to appreciate more of the small touches put into every set piece. It looks particularly good framed in an ultrawide resolution, where the original’s cinematic aspect ratio gives more space for the art to breathe. There’s also proper 16:9 widescreen support as well now, properly framing it for regular widescreen monitors, instead of the cramped feeling of the original’s forced 16:10.Sine Mora is a game that definitely benefits from these small presentation, especially given how shooters can shift dramatically with a change in framing.
On the same note, Sine Mora EX introduces a new English voice acting track. Unless you knew Hungarian, the original’s story could be difficult to follow, taking place over two parallel timelines and presented mostly through walls of text. The new voice acting makes the story easier to follow, especially in moments where dodging bullets distracted from the in-game radio chatter. The chatter itself lends it the feeling of a World War 2 dog fighting tale, though the delivery of the lines doesn’t always sell the drama.
There’s a few other WWII parallels in the story as well, which revolves around a war dealing with racial discrimination, genocide, and the nuclear bombardment of a nation. It’s an ungraceful story, which involves plot points like a main characters blackmailing a sexual assault survivor into flying a suicide mission under threat of revealing her racial background to the invading empire. It’s tasteless, ugly, and unnecessary, and doesn’t contribute to the wider world it takes place in. The rest of the story is similarly clumsy, trying for greater ambitions, but generally tripping over them with its poor delivery.
The story impedes on the action too, with dialogue and cinematic scenes that’re repeated on every attempt. This is true even in arcade mode, where the dialogue is removed but the timing for them is left intact. A few of these sequences lend some downtime and some surprisingly compelling ambient breaks, especially alongside the soundtrack, which contains a mix of tonal electronica from Akira Yamaoka. They cinematic scenes don’t work as well on repeat though, and chop up the momentum, especially when placed in between phases of a boss. Every time I repeated a section I spent a lot of time holding a button to scrub through these scenes in fast forward, coming to an abrupt stop, then scrubbing through the next scene.
And I ended up repeating A LOT of Sine Mora. That’d generally be ok, hell maybe even thematically relevant given the game’s time travel conceits, but death usually comes in a clumsy, disappointing finish. Sine Mora uses a timer in place of health or lives, which constantly ticks down and requires destroying enemies or reaching a checkpoint in order to replenish it. It gives leeway than traditional shooters, and forces you to play aggressively to survive.
It’s not a problem on its own, though it does make failure more ambiguous than most shooters. But it’s compounded with the ambiguity of the collision detection. My hitbox wasn’t always clear, and worse, the richness of the art began to obscure elements of the game. Bullets blend with graphical effects, powerups become lost in smoke, and it’s not always clear which part of the multi-layer environments can be collided with. This hits its peak during some tighter cave and valley sections, and one arduous sequence in a factory where I needed to fly inside a cloud of debris to avoid being instantly destroyed.
On top of that there’s often sections where wind or other forces will slowly act on the ship, throwing off its relative position to the scrolling screen, which forced me to constantly push back to avoid collisions. And while the leeway given by the timer system could mitigate the damage, getting hit also drops damage powerups. Even basic enemies take multiple hits, so losing damage can make it difficult to hold them off and keep the timer replenished. Every hit becomes a mad scramble to retrieve the powerups, which quickly turned into a spiral of repeated damage that drained the timer in no time.There are small changes in Sine Mora EX that ease these problems, but this core loop of ambiguous damage leading into more mistakes still exists and made repeat attempts into a chore rather than feeling like a chance to improve.
To me, that’s the core of the shooter genre. The chance to learn the rhythms of a game and to slowly improve your path through it. And Sine Mora EX does improve on the original, but in superficial ways. The art remains a spectacle, and this new version does a lot to highlight it. But the core of it still frustrates by constantly interrupting its own momentum, and the new additions don’t repair that. The two player mode is barely worth talking about either, with a perfunctory campaign that adds a pod controlled by the second player and a versus mode that’s so shallow and unparseable I can’t see anyone playing the absurd number of rounds it expects you to play before declaring a winner.
Sine Mora is an interesting game. Polished, but flawed in major ways that prevent it from delivering on the promises it makes. It frustrated me. The art, music, and world were all genuinely compelling, but they ended up assembled in a clumsy way that left them with less as a whole. With Sine Mora EX, I thought a return to it might leave me feeling more forgiving, but I could only see the same mistakes of the past.