"Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warship" is a kind of space shooter/salvage game. One pilots a small space worthy pod around the various stages while fighting off enemies and trying to tow loot back to a mothership. To get to a new stage, one must collect enough fuel to blast off, all the while collecting items and searching for the elusive fragments of the Golden Warship that are hidden in each area. Solar Jetman is a cute, reasonably challenging diversion, but contains few things to motivate the player, and most of the challenges consist of absurdly annoying enemies rather than anything creative.
The most graphically exceptional part of this game is the pod the player navigates in. It has smooth, clean animation and can rotate a full 360 degrees. Aside from that the game looks regrettably barren. The terrain and stage transitions are fairly nice looking, but few other things are pleasant to look at. Many of the enemies are fairly generic flying spheres that fire bullets, or simply animated laser turrets. Backgrounds are uncommon, and while this does help keep track of what is happening on screen, it also makes most levels exceedingly dull to explore.
While some of Solar Jetman's music is pretty decent, the majority is subdued, uninteresting, and very repetitive. With the exception of some of the collision noises, most of the sound effects are also very basic beeps and chirps. This is not a game to be played with the volume turned up.
This game lives and dies by it's content and play control. At first glance, both seem to be very nice. One collects valuable "treasures", such as ancient phone booths and chests full of tennis balls. These can be exchanged for ship upgrades and useful power-ups. The pod one flies around in also operates by realistic physics and momentum. Gravity and momentum become a big concern when lugging a crate of Easter Island heads through a tight passage to the mothership. Sadly however, neither the gathering of items nor the physics help the game out much. While the game is lots of fun early on, things quickly degenerate into tedium and frustration. The enemies most certainly do NOT operate under the same restrictions as the player, and it is nearly impossible to adequately protect the pod from the lightning quick, bullet spraying opponents that periodically swarm the screen. In addition, the upgrades that can be obtained for the pod really aren't very interesting. While the super shields, momentum killers and all the other stuff that can be purchased is useful, it does little to spice up the tedium of hunting for money and fuel. Even should one manage to win through to the final battle in the Golden Warship, the last fight is nearly impossible, and no retrys are allowed. Fail the exceedingly difficult end battle even once and the game is over. The physics and some of the early treasures obtained might make Solar Jetman an interesting game to try, but don't bother staying up past your bedtime to play it.
Summary:
| Graphics : 85% | Gameplay graphics are often bland, but some are fairly nice. |
| Audio : 60% | Poor audio, yet there were a small number of nice exceptions. |
| Gameplay : 30% | While fun early on, things quickly get worse. Much worse. |
| Personal Curve : 70% | I am awarding some bonus points for the creative use of tennis balls. |
Overall: 62% : Solar Jetman has some nice qualities, yet it uses them very poorly. This combines with an absent plot and unbalanced enemies to make this game a regrettably uninteresting experience.