Glory Days 2 spices up the side-scrolling shooter genre with light strategy elements. As you fly your plane or copter, you'll juggle the tasks of:
- engaging enemy fighters,
- bombing vehicles,
- rescuing civilians,
- capturing bunkers,
- and funding an army,
Attempting to juggle all these factors can be an overwhelming ordeal. But Glory Days 2 streamlines these elements with an effective control scheme that allows you to quickly manage all these tasks. The controls take some practice (read, "sometimes unintuitive"). To ease the micromanagement, both screens show at a glance the status of the battlefield, troop locations, and everything else needed to conquer the enemy.
The campaign serves as a tutorial that eases you into the game, iterating on the number of tasks given to the player. Completing the short but action-packed campaign unlocks options in skirmish mode. Multiplayer includes the same skirmish options and may be played competitively or cooperatively but requires multiple cartridges and has no online.
The 2D engine is quite impressive. Literally hundreds of sprites will march across the battlefield, and as your vehicle flies across the sky, the detailed multi-layered scenery will pan with an illusion of depth. There are also many day, night, and weather effects.
Sound effects consist of standard whooshes and pops, but the music is often the star of the show. It is beautifully grand and approprately epic.
The campaign may be short, and while skirmish offers plenty of variety, it's the only other available mode. Fortunately, the core gameplay is solid enough to occupy for hours.