The Stack

As in the original arcade game, most levels in Sinistar Unleashed start off with a number of stationary turrets scattered about. When you’re in range, they turn slowly to face you and then fire in barrages, a long cone of fire randomly packed with bullets every few seconds. Seeing that many bullets at once is scary, but I’ve found that the best way to deal with it is to face the turret head on. You present a smaller profile that way, thus getting hit by fewer bullets, and although you’ll still get hit multiple times, you can easily kill the turret before it kills you. If, that is, you actually want to kill it — enemies can be damaged by friendly fire, and sometimes the easiest way to get attackers off your tail is to head into a turret and let it shoot it them down for you.

(Can you be damaged by friendly fire too? I assume so, but it’s hard to be sure, because of the lack of friendlies. There’s a Special Item that you can use to place turrets of your own, but their bullets are fewer and more precise than the enemy’s. You’d have to try pretty hard to get hit by them.)

Past level 16, however, there’s a new sort of turret that I haven’t figured out how to best deal with yet: the laser turret. Instead of a barrage of bullets, it fires a continuous beam. It can take a few seconds to home in on your position, but once it’s locked on, it follows you unerringly until it pauses to recharge. Facing into this gets you killed. You have to move perpendicular to the beam to avoid it, and that means you’re not facing the beam and can’t shoot at it with your primary weapon. Some of the secondary weapons, such as homing missiles, don’t need to be aimed, and could be useful here, but as I’ve said before, I’m inclined to save those for emergencies.

I may need to finally master the clutch. This is something that’s occasionally mentioned in the helpful hints that appear at the end of the game: “Take advantage of the clutch, it’s a very powerful tool” or words to that effect. But I hadn’t used it and frankly didn’t even know what it did. I think there was a button assigned to it on the controller by default, but it was one of the less easily-discoverable ones, like pressing the right joystick or something. Again, this game wasn’t really designed for a gamepad. The manual is written under the assumption that you’re using some kind of flight-simulator stick — in describing how to roll left and right, it says to twist your joystick — and what’s more, that you’re using it in conjunction with a keyboard — in describing the clutch, it says to use the space bar. I’ve rebound it to the left shoulder button, which was previously shields, a special item that I only occasionally have.

What the clutch does is this: it allows you to pivot without changing the direction you’re moving, like in Space War and Asteroids. This would clearly be useful against laser turrets: you could take off laterally, then clutch and turn and fire at the turret while still moving laterally. It also seems like it would be useful against ordinary warrior ships: they like to chase you and fire at you from behind, and with the clutch, I could just fire back at my pursuers.

But this is all predicated on actually getting good at using the clutch, which will take some practice. And it occurs to me as I write this that strafing could also be an affective approach to laser turrets. But I’ve unbound strafing from my gamepad. I just don’t have enough buttons for this game!

Maybe I should actually get myself a flight stick. I’m not a big flight sim fan, but this isn’t the only game on the Stack designed around them.