Dux Trio Hands On

[cube_b3]

To celebrate my younger brothers 15th birthday this sunday I finally unboxed all Hucast games and we sat down to play.

We played Dux 1.0 and in less than 5 minutes ran out of all our lives.

We played Dux 1.5 and easily made it to the boss of the 2nd stage before running out of our lives.

We played Redux and ran out of our lives around mid way in the 2nd stage.

After that my brother said, thank you very much and left.

The next day I continued to play Dux 1.0 for over an hour and couldn't get further than the midway 2nd level. The game is atrociously difficult, has a few careless bugs and some stupid design choices such as forcing the players to repeatedly press the X button to shoot. My hands really started to hurt by the time I stopped playing.

Yesterday night I started playing Dux 1.5 and it was a much more pleasant experience, I know longer had to repeatedly press the x button to shoot, I could comfortably hold it down. Other notoriously difficult design choices such as the check point system has been eliminated. Additionally the ability to manually toggle between vertical and horizontal firing sub weapons have been added. Previously horizontal or vertical sub weapons had to be collected.

I played the game for 2 hours and made it to the 4th stage before running out of continues.

I played the game for 3 hours today and beat it.

I am fairly certain I mastered it as well.

Dux 1.5 is basically Dux 1.0 in Easy difficulty. Dux 1.5 offers a remixed soundtrack, unfortunately the option to switch between remix and classic soundtrack doesn't exist. Nor the ability to switch back to Dux 1.0 (aka hard difficulty mode), therefore necessitating the player to own Dux 1.1 for a functional experience.

Lastly, Dux 1.0 had visibility options that are also omitted in 1.5 and the option to switch the control scheme for horizontal to vertical (which required rotating the tv 90 degrees) these options have also been removed.

I would give Dux 1.0 2/10
I would have given Dux 1.5 a higher score but the omission of several Dux 1.0 features, difficulty mode, and sound track forced me to drop the rating to 4/10 however since it is a budget title or a free upgrade I will give it a 5/10, had the aforementioned features been included it would've been 6/10

I played Redux today as well and it is basically Dux in Medium difficulty. The gameplay is perfect atleast for the original ship. I am not a fan of the remake of the first stage, It looks like it is trying to impersonate Sturmwind. The camera has panned out and the ship has a nice side view where as the 1.0 and 1.5 had an awkward bird eye view of the ship. Unfortunately everything goes down the crapper when the visuals end up looking inferior to the previous 2 versions.

I am tentatively giving Redux a 3/10, had the game been a budget title I would've given it a 4/10.

I would not recommend playing any version of Dux unless you are really desperate to play a sh'mup on Dreamcast. Even if all three versions of Dux were perfectly incorporated onto a single disc it wouldn't hold a candle in front of Sturmwind.

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So this is basically an unproof read 1st draft of nothing.
I will sit with my brother and write a detailed hands on experience of Dux 1.0, followed by a full review of Dux 1.5 and finally a review of Redux: Dark Matters. As I play the game more the ratings could change for all of them.