 Tidus Software is probably most infamously known for Superman for N64, one of the most dreadfully awful games ever made, but before that, they actually had a hand in quite a few Super Nintendo games, granted they're not exactly instant classics, stuff like Blues Brothers, Prehistoric Man and Realm. No not that Realm, and not to be confused with the early 90's PC game, Realms. This is a 2D side scrolling run and gun game taking place in the year 5069 AD, and you're fighting off an alien invasion through four long levels, starting in a forest and working your way into the alien's home base. You play as a super cyborg called Biomech, and he looks like Trunks cosplaying as Vegeta. Seriously, that looks almost exactly like Vegeta's outfit. Anyway, it's your standard run and gun fare here. You pick up a variety of different weapons from homing lasers to spread guns to more powerful lasers. You can flip between two of them at a time, with each having their own respective ammo that you can collect by shooting these crystals. And you'll need every bit of ammo you can get because one quality this game has is the number of bosses and mini bosses you have to fight. Yeah, it's pretty simple pattern recognition, but there's some interesting battles here. Like this human heart that throws what look like blood clots at you, or this crazy phlegmwad looking thing, or this spaceship you shoot up at as you're falling. That's pretty cool. What keeps realm from being good or even decent though, is the level design. The opening forest level in particular just feels blah and uninspired. The layout is just kinda thrown together, and you just wander all over the place. Granted, there are some interesting elements here like these platforms. You have to rotate by shooting a switch while fending off these cool looking tree climbers. But then you get this section here, where you're just making blind jumps while these flaming tumbleweeds bounce all over the place. It just feels totally random, and it's frustrating for the wrong reasons. Also, there's no battery save or passwords here. This is yet another game you gotta beat in one sitting. The controls are good enough. Nothing that touches the likes of stuff like Contra or Super Turrican, but it controls better than something like Timeslip, or some of the more generic and derivative front and gun games out there. You can hold L or R to lock in a diagonal shooting angle like Super Metroid, which is a nice feature. But other than that, it plays about as you'd expect, just not as tight and precise as some of the more prominent games of the time. The graphics are okay, not terrible, not great, and again the highlight is the boss and mini-boss design, which is pretty cool. There's also some cool effects here, like when you defeat this heart mini-boss, the sun briefly shines through before it starts raining. The music kinda sorta reminds me a bit of Super Turrican, only much cheaper sounding, if that makes sense. Same with the sound design, I feel I've heard all these sound effects before in a ton of other games. So, yeah, Realm is okay-ish, it's not in the same universe as stuff like Contra, and probably better compares to lesser titles like Timeslip, which I looked at a few months ago. Realm is better looking than that game, and controls much better, and the game cuts a quicker pace. But the level design in Realm is just kinda uninspired. Here's another example where you're riding this cool-looking machine thing, but that's the extent of it, it just carries you up the incline and you fire at enemies as usual. I will say the game does get better the further you progress, but the first couple levels really drag this one down. Realm is frustrating, but there is some cool stuff here, you just have to work to get to it, and whether or not you wanna put in the work is up to you.