I know I’m not alone in my preference for vertical shmups, especially of the bullet hell variety. It’s hard to articulate well, but tracking bullets, reading patterns, and positioning your ship just feels so much more intuitive in a vert. But every now and then, a game will come along …
You know the drill: squeeze through tiny gaps in screen-filling bullet patterns, unleash some bullet hell of your own with a powerful, wide-reaching cannon, hold the shot button to focus fire for an immensely powerful laser and slower, more careful movement. In a lot of ways, Z-Warp is a more …
Want to try your hand at making a shoot-’em-up, but not sure where to start? You may want to check out the new SHMUP Creator software that just landed on Steam today. As the name suggests, it is to shmups what RPG Maker is to RPGs and Visual Novel Maker …
If you’re feeling sleepy and need a quick jolt to wake you up, a quick round of Crimzon Clover: World EXplosion is a good way to go. It’s an assault on the senses even by bullet hell standards, with so much brightly-coloured plasma and so many shiny gold medals filling …
Halfway through the third stage of Castle of Shikigami 2, a boss called “Freyr” shows up. With a name like that, shoot-’em-up genre conventions, and the few other bosses under your belt by that point establishing the game’s dark fantasy style, you’d probably expect some huge, threatening mech or a …
Space Moth DX was already an accomplished CAVE-style shoot-’em-up that put a unique risk/reward twist on the familiar dichotomy of the rapid-fire spread shot and a high-power, focused laser. With a remixed scoring system and new mechanics, Space Moth: Lunar Edition —1CC Games’ answer to CAVE’s Black Labels—takes those same …
Overnight, NIS America unveiled the next game from World’s End Club and Death Come True developer Izanagi Games, and it sounds captivating: a mash-up of bullet hell shmup and Zero Escape-style escape adventure called Yurukill: The Calumniation Games. Set in a hellish amusement park, Yurukill sees convicted thrown into a …
Alfa Team’s classic shoot-’em-up Castle of Shikigami 2 is making its way to Nintendo Switch and Steam this December, with two new game modes and a new English translation, thanks to Degica Games. Originally released for arcade in 2003, Castle of Shikigami 2 is a dark fantasy shmup set in …
Team Good Knight and Doublethink Games’ Good Knight is out now on Steam Early Access, dishing up a “butt-clenching” heavy metal bullet hell steeped in Filipino mythology. Drawing inspiration from everything from Dante’s Inferno and Greek classics to Super Hexagon, Castlevania, and rhythm and puzzle games, Good Knight is a …
Returnal should not be a roguelike, and I say this as someone who rather enjoys that genre. It’s a remarkable game in so many ways: full of the sort of frantic yet precise action that Housemarque is unrivalled at creating, but on a whole new level of scale and ambition, …
