Yeah, Scurge, not Scourge. Scourge is a 2D 3/4 action-rpg for the GBA/DS. The premise of the game is absolutely Metroid (special agent Jenosa Arma is sent to investigate an infection on a planet ;what’s with the jarring names anyway?) and the gameplay takes some cues too. Now the Metroid influence comes mainly from Fusion, which means the game is linear as hell. Running through a complex in 3/4 works surprisingly well though.
The game play has two pillars. The first one is staying alive. There are weapon upgrades you can use for ease and variety but though I found myself switching weapons frantically -the mechanism is seamless- I almost never faced death by hits alone. Some eye-hand coordination and reflexes are required though. As an added bonus [STRIKE]Samus[/STRIKE] Jenosa is infected on her first encounter with the aliens and has an infection rate rising to 100%. Once it’s there you begin losing 3hp/sec, though health pads patch you up. You need to keep an eye on that but it certainly isn’t as annoying as it sounds -especially since beating enemies yields you hp/xp little balls that can keep you alive if the place is packed. A spiffy aspect is the upgrade to your firing rate which visibly boosts your rate of fire; you get that when you beat a boss and it’s both useful and makes you feel cool.
The second pillar of the game is searching for keycards to open doors, manipulating kind-of-switches and finding the correct paths to do all that. Oh and deactivating 6 security pads for each teleport. This part of the game can cause some frustration initially but once you get the feeling of the game you will always know how it works. The good news is that even after having to find x keycards after having found y keycards the game remains fun. Mind, the action part is heavy without being that challenging but I still want to wake up tomorrow and find a way to unfreeze my game at the boss to go to chapter 5/7. Who cares about exams?
I doubt the game has any kind of replayability (though hard/insane difficulty may help if I let it lie for some time) but it’s clean good fun. And in the end a different beast than the Metroids, we just love namedropping, it seems.