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Steel Vampire is an excellent, unconventional shoot ’em up that is well worth taking some time to get to grips with. It’s a game that rewards continued play over the long term — and which is enormously satisfying and enjoyable in the short term. If you enjoy playing this kind of game very aggressively, this should be an essential purchase — and if you’ve been bottling up a bit of stress and are looking for a good outlet, this might be just the thing for you! Get blastin’!
It’s a straightforward, simple, arcade-style game that rewards your continued engagement not with cynical “player retention” systems designed to keep you grinding and/or paying up for microtransactions — a noteworthy point, particularly considering poncle’s background in making online casino and slot machine games — but with additional ways to have fun. It’s considerately designed, it’s highly entertaining, and it’s absolutely brilliant.
Definitely a great game to have available to you when you want something a bit more “gentle” to just sit back and relax with — just try not to feel too bad as the end of your century rolls around and Amaterasu looks really sad about having to part ways with you!
It would have perhaps been nice to see some discrete difficulty levels — and it definitely would have been great to see online leaderboards — but if you’re a shoot ’em up fan and you pick this one up, you’re going to have, if you’ll pardon the expression, a blast.
To put it another way: in Needy Streamer Overload, you should be prepared for failure, because you’re likely to encounter it in one form or another before long. But that doesn’t mean you’ve “lost” or that you’ve played the game wrong; the one advantage that this game has over reality is that you can go back and try again to see what results taking a different approach might yield. Who knows? You might even find some helpful insights to consider for yourself along the way, too.
For those hungry for “content”, Cake Invaders is going to disappoint you, because it is what it is and absolutely nothing more than that. But for those who remember — or at least appreciate — the good old days of a game having absolutely no shame in simply being a game and nothing else, you’ll have a good time with this one. It’s a great game to have installed on your Switch for when you just fancy a quick blast between more substantial gaming sessions — and in that sense, it fits right in with the rest of Zoo’s excellent library on the platform.
It’s a fun puzzler worth spending some time with, then — but as a Miku game, it is left considerably wanting. And that’s a bit of a shame; past Miku games have felt as much like a celebration of Miku and the culture surrounding her as anything, but here it just feels like she’s been slapped on a game that had its origins elsewhere at the last moment. And at this point, she deserves better.
It’s clear that was the sole intention behind this game — and in that regard they’ve succeeded admirably. Whether or not you love Nep, this is a delightful arcade-style game that pays loving and respectful homage to an all-time classic — and which provides enough twists on the formula it’s referencing to feel like its own distinct and worthwhile experience in its own right. A definite winner. Top Nep indeed!
Queeny Army presents a stiff challenge. It’s perhaps not quite as brutally hard as the developers tried to position it as on its original PC release, but it does provide an authentically challenging retro-style experience that nicely captures the feel of NES games in particular. It has an endearingly sort of “home-grown” feel to it thanks to a few rough edges on the character art in particular, but this just helps to distinguish it from big-budget titles and make it clear that this very much was one man’s passion project.
To put it another way, Moon Dancer is, appropriately enough, a good game to “graduate” to once you’ve got comfortable with something more straightforward and traditional like Raging Blasters. The core skills of paying attention to enemy attacks and avoiding bullet patterns will serve you well in Moon Dancer; you then simply need to layer the skill of effectively using the lock-on laser atop those fundamentals in order to see some success.
I’ll refrain from explaining the exact conclusions for the sake of those who have read this far and still want to play this game. Suffice to say that despite its wonky translation, it’s a good use of your time, a very effective horror game — and one I suspect is going to stick around in my mind for quite some time.
If you’ve not played Mary Skelter 2 or its predecessor, this is still a solid way to experience both titles (a remastered version of the first game is included for free). It has next to no graphics options, but solid support for both keyboard/mouse and controllers, and the actual dungeon crawling gameplay is enjoyable. But if you want 100% of the game to be available on PC, then you’re out of luck.
For those looking for truly spectacular shoot ’em ups, Armed 7 might initially seem like a bit of a hard sell due to its visual jank in particular — but give it a chance and you’ll find a highly playable, very enjoyable and ridiculously addictive shoot ’em up to enjoy; like most of Astro Port’s other stuff, this one will keep you coming back for quite some time to come.
On the whole, then, Sturmwind EX is an enjoyable shoot ’em up with just a few little hiccups that hold it back from being among the very best the modern genre has to offer. None of its flaws should be enough to put you off playing, however; look on its occasional jank (and its regrettable lack of online leaderboards) as it having “character”, and get on with enjoying the sheer pleasure of blasting away at enemies with the game’s delightful arsenal of weapons.
Dangun Feveron is a great choice if you fancy trying your hand at a blaster you might actually make it all the way through on a single credit. It’s a ton of fun and a worthy addition to the modern shoot ’em up library.
With all this in mind, Dairoku: Agents of Sakuratani ended up being a particularly slow playthrough for me due to its many shortcomings. But it has plenty of aspects to compliment.
Was it worth the wait? Absolutely; a restoration project of this magnitude is worthy of note, if nothing else — but when the final game ends up being a lot of charming fun on top of all that, then yes, it most definitely was worth the wait.
To summarise, then, if you’re open to the experience of playing a walking simulator with a very clear creative, artistic vision and not much in the way of what many of us would traditionally regard as “gameplay”, Drizzlepath: Deja Vu is a short but sweet journey worth taking. For those typically more resistant to such things, though, Drizzlepath: Deja Vu isn’t going to change your mind; take a look at the work of Chilla’s Art for a more gameplay-centric approach to the “walking simulator” as a storytelling vehicle.
It’s a pity that this sort of behaviour is seemingly so inevitable in a game like this; this is the sort of thing that causes the entire gaming community to be saddled with labels that many of us don’t deserve. Unfortunately, Crab Game appears to demonstrate that it’s just default behaviour for a not-insignificant number of people online — and we should perhaps ask ourselves collectively how it came to this.
Regardless of all this, however, Strikers 1945 is an excellent shoot ’em up, and a great way to kick off the Psikyo Shooting Stars collections on Switch — yet another example of how the platform is an amazing gateway to retro experiences from nearly every distinct era of gaming history at this point.