Xain'd Sleena review: five planets, and you pick the order

Xain'd Sleena is hard to summarize, and that is the charm of it. A man drops out of a starship with a gun, and the screen scrolls to the right and upward at the same time. Is it a shooter, or a platform game? It is stubbornly both, and 1986 was the right year for that. Technōs Japan made it and published it at home, Taito licensed it for release everywhere else, and Memetron put it on American floors under a different name entirely.

The screen that asks where you want to go

The game opens on a starfield with five planets on it, and it lets you choose. Xain is a galactic bounty hunter, and the forces oppressing those five worlds are waiting in whatever order you like. There is no official sequence, so no two players tell quite the same story about it. Some of us cleared the easy worlds first to bank the points, and some of us went straight at the hardest one while we still had lives.

The US version, released as Solar Warrior, dropped that choice and ran a set sequence instead. One screen gone, and a different game to remember.

Hand the player the running order and the stage stops being yours.

Crouch, double crouch, double jump

Inside a planet the camera moves right and up, so you are dodging terrain as much as bullets. Xain can crouch, drop lower into a prone double crouch, jump, and jump again in midair. That last one matters: the ledges are placed for a second jump, not a first.

Certain enemies carry a powerup that replaces your default laser gun. You might come out of a fight with a laser-grenade gun, a 2-way gun, a spreadfire gun or a strong bullet gun, and the weapon you happen to be holding decides how the rest of the planet goes.

Ten seconds to the ship

Each planet ends with a boss, and beating it is not the end of the sequence. You plant a bomb in the boss's base and get ten seconds to reach your starship. The relief of winning turns instantly into a countdown, which is a wonderful trick to pull on a player.

Between worlds you fly an interlude, shooting through waves of enemy ships, and after three planets there is an asteroid field and a giant mothership in the way. Liberate all five and the game opens its long final stage on a metallic fortress, where the bosses you already beat are waiting and fighting them is optional. Halfway through you plant one more bomb, and this time you have 60 seconds to reach the exit hangar.

What it meant back then

Nobody in the arcade could pronounce the title, so it went by whatever was on the marquee that week. In America that was Solar Warrior, which sounded like a movie nobody had seen, and in Europe the home computer versions arrived as Soldier of Light. Three names for one game is a very 1986 problem.

What stuck was the choosing screen. Standing behind a stranger and hearing them announce which planet they were taking is a small thing, but it turned a quiet cabinet into a conversation.

Playing it now

It is fast and the terrain is tight, so expect to lose early runs to a ledge rather than a bullet. Stay patient, use the prone crouch to let shots pass, and learn which weapon you actually want to keep. The pleasure holds up: a shooter that trusts you to plan your own campaign, and a countdown at the end of every one of them.