I was really enjoying it until I had to find the ship parts. Then it became tedious since you're then forced to go through all the areas you have already been through trying to find the pieces -- sure, you will have access to a handful of new areas, but you'll still have to slog through familiar places yet again to reach them. That, coupled with learning that you must save ALL the Tribals really dragged it down, caused me to lose a lot of interest in finishing it (I almost had to force myself to keep playing it at that point). And then add on discovering that there is a necessary mini-game to get one of the parts, not to mention that to get it is no walk in the park (it took me about 325 attempts and around 3 hours), and THEN that it actually uses the Tokens (which is why I know about how many attempts it took me since I ran through the nearly 200 Tokens I had with Lupus, and then I noted how many I started with the next time I attempted it with Juno since he had the most) which serve no real use (the amount of tokens to buy full health and ammo is so negligible and because the places where you can do this are almost all well hidden, IMO they should have just been a free auto-recharge station), and I really started to despise this game. It would have been a solid 8/10 otherwise.
Like most N64 games, I can't stand the controls thanks to the analog stick. What made it especially frustrating for me was that when you enter targeting mode, you aim with the analog, but the thing that made it terrible is that at some point when you are trying to get the crosshairs on the enemy, it then causes your character to move it's neutral sight position, which causes a bit of a jerk in where you end up targeting because now you've moved both the center and the distance from the center. As with every N64 game that I know of, you can't re-map the controls, but this does give you two controller options. The problem is that the "Normal" configuration removes some of the functionality, as you can't move forward or backward while in targeting mode -- which may be why only the Expert layout is shown in the game manual. It does give you the ability to quick map 4 weapons to the D-Pad (amazingly, a game actually uses the D-Pad), but it's too bad that the controller design is so horrible because unless you have an unorthodox way of holding the controller, the best I can personally reach with my thumb is down and right, so in order to utilize it, you'll need to take one hand off and move it to the left part of the controller.
I really liked the music. I also liked the worlds.
Other than a couple places (like the one where as soon as you enter the area, there are two missiles already en route to your location), it is a pretty easy game. The thing that made the bosses at all difficult is that you can ONLY strafe -- I had to look up the first boss strategy because I thought the game glitched on me after my second attempt, considering there is room to move forward and backward. It would also have been nice to know that Juno's suit protects him from lava (the manual gives Vera's and Lupus' unique abilities, but not Juno's) as I wasted a good bit of time trying to figure out what I needed to do when I ran into a lava room, since I'm not apt to just jump into lava all willy nilly.
They could have given the jetpack "puzzles" a bit more beef if you could use the jetpacks outside of the area with the refuel pads, instead of the fuel tanks just mysteriously running dry by walking into another room. It would have also been nice to have healed while in transit between worlds, which seems to me to be a logical function of a futuristic spacecraft.
Just remove the required mini-games and allow FMV skipping (it gets really tedious watching the lengthy animations of the various craft approach and land at every location every single time), and this would be the first, to me, great N64 game that I've played.
