Game is awesome once you understand the mechanics.


Give the game an hour or so. Read some tips. Once you understand the basic mechanics along with the upgrade system, the game becomes a lot of fun.

I really only bought this to support one of my favorite game genres getting a big budget, graphics showpiece. Maybe it was because I had read so much negative feedback that my expectations had lowered, but I think this is a worthy entry into the shmup universe.

It took me over an hour to beat the first level on easy. Once I got over that initial difficulty hurdle and upgrades opened up, the game clicked. Now I use the first two levels to farm upgrade points.

It seems to chaotic to the point of being poorly designed at first, but once you continue to grasp the speed and flow of the game, you realize that you are actually able to dodge all those bullets on screen. Once you have the drone side guns and can customize the weapon spread via 6 different slots, you will be switching on the fly as you are able to mow down packs of planes taking up half the screen.

Learning to balance shield power and weapon power is probably the first hurdle that many people seem to find confusing. Here is the one most important thing to know: When weapon energy is full, all the health/energy pickups will go towards filling the shield. However, the reverse is not true. So if your shields are full but weapons aren't, then the pick ups go to waste (although they will go towards upgrade points). I have found that keeping weapons at max energy until I want to fire off missiles is the best strategy. As soon as I fire the missiles, I hit R1 (RB on xbox controller) to slide a slot of shield power back to the weapon energy. Then I simply pick up the shield/energy left over by the ships that are destroyed and now I'm back to full shield power.

Long story short, if your shield is full the energy pick ups will go towards upgrades but not towards your weapon bar, so if you want more weapon power and slots available, always try to keep the weapon energy bar full.

As far as upgrades, I think getting the homing is good as well as radial damage, but more important in my opinion is the different gun angles. This allows you to approach different enemies and enemy clusters in smarter ways. You can have slots dedicated to large weapon spread or concentrated fire. After level 3 you can unlock drones, which are really just two extra guns that give you more options on bigger spread or simply more straight on fire power.

The other thing people get hung up on is ground enemies. To me this is much more straight forward. L2 shoots ground enemies with a laser via auto lock on. You use the right stick to switch between targets when auto locked on. Don't over think this one.

The game does not explain itself well, but it isn't rocket science either. Taking a few minutes to watch a youtube video or read some tips should be enough to get on the right track if my advice here was not enough.

All in all, I really like the game. The graphics are unbelievable, and the 60 fps cap does not bother me considering the lack of free camera movement. MSAA for anti aliasing is always a plus too. The scale and design of the levels and enemies is at times breath taking. It feels like a next gen game in every way, while retaining the old school style gameplay.

I highly recommend fans of the genre to buy this game, not just to support these game so more get made in the future, but simply because it is a really fun game.