The bullet hell genre neverreallyhad its day in the sun. While games of this ilk made up parts of the arcade landscape decades ago, they were never the centerpiece, and when consoles took over, they maintained that niche status. Over time, they have only been pushed further away from center stage.
This is what makesCygni: All Guns Blazingsuch a tantalizing proposition: it’s a glossy release in a genre that hasn’t seen one in the better part of a decade. But does it do enough to make its mark, or will it be another stray bullet in a sea of thousands?
Bullet hell is a subgenre of shoot-‘em’-up. These titles typically see you piloting a ship (though not always,sometimes you are a naked man), and blasting your way through waves of enemies as you are pushed forward alongside the screen. Bullet hell titles emphasize filling the screen with projectiles, and have become the dominant form of shmup in the modern era. Some standout hits include games like Radiant Silver Gun, Ikaruga, DonPachi, and Batsugun.
Cygni is a graphically intensive, polygon-rich sight to behold. It’s fascinating to see a Shmup (short for shoot ‘em up) made with modern polygonal graphics, and the end result is pretty sharp. Do the screen-filling explosions make it hard to see the thousands of projectiles being fired by the dozens of enemies you’ll be fighting at any given moment? Absolutely. But visual noise is part of the fun when dealing with bullet hell.
Unfortunately, as modern and shiny as everything is, it can feel a touch sterile. Some of the bosses are visual showstoppers, and the use of perspective gives them a fantastic sense of scale, but I’d struggle to recall what the majority of the standard enemies even look like. The plain Jane UI follows suit and only stands out for how mediocre and forgettable it manages to look. It is all perfectly serviceable, but lacks character.
This criticism carries through to Cygni’s soundtrack. With bullet hells usually being filled with delightfully melodic tracks that thump and bump in all the right ways, Cygni’s musical score disappoints. It has strong ‘John Williams at-home’ vibes. You could charitably call it cinematic, but the more accurate label would be uninspired. This is just another element to file under ‘serviceable’.
What Cygni lacks in aesthetic charm, it makes up for in its gameplay. Enemies flood the screen firing streams of bullets, weaving every which way. Armed with your customizable airship, you’ll blast them out of the air with your machine guns, homing missiles, and laser cannons, while deftly weaving between bullets as they come towards you.
The massive bosses take up an impressive amount of each arena, and all manage to push you to use all your available tools as you look to survive their various phases of attacks. The game is at its best when you are facing off against these colossal foes.
One of Cygni’s primary gameplay flourishes is providing the player with the ability to use the right analog stick to influence the direction they fire in. This isn’t a twin stick shooter, so your bullets can’t be fired in all 360 degrees, but you are given enough range of motion to help your ship thread the needle while zeroing in on enemies with your primary weapon systems.
Additionally, the energy management mechanic allows you to allocate energy on the fly, giving you the ability to enhance your attack options or bolster your defense like you would in far more complex space battle simulators. This leads to a great push-your-luck style of gameplay, as your best play while fighting a tougher enemy is to load up on attack power, but that will often require you to leave your ship in a vulnerable state. Add on to that the more robust enemies that will flee after a set period of time, further encouraging you to double down on power so that you may take them out and harvest their sweet, sweet energy.
An element that is destined to be controversial is the game’s uncompromising approach to death. While you can take multiple hits (if you allocate your energy to shields, at least), there are no extra lives, nor are there continues (outside the easy setting, that is). Missions aren’t short in Cygni, so having the boss of a stage blow your ship to pieces, sending you back to the beginning of the stage in the process, feels inordinately cruel. Yet, that same cruelty does help to ratchet up the tension during those same boss battles. It is a brave direction to go in, and it will most certainly push certain gamers away, but I think that controller-gripping tension it lends the game helps justify its existence.
What is less justifiable is the difficulty curve. A number of extremely helpful tools are locked away in the upgrades menu. In order to unlock them, you’ll need to collect energy while your health is full. Once you complete a stage, every excess energy node you have collected will become a credit you can use to purchase upgrades.
One of the most interesting upgrades comes in the form of being able to personalize your weapon’s firing pattern. While it doesn’t offer a tremendous number of options, it is still super fun to play around with.
At a glance, it sounds like a fun mechanic that rewards skillful play, but the end result is that if you are already good at the game, you’ll unlock powerful weapons that make the game easier. Meanwhile, if you are struggling, using every last energy node to just barely scrape by, you will have few credits to bank after completing a stage, making the next stage disproportionatelymoredifficult.
There are a number of elements present in Cygni: All Guns Blazing that underwhelm. From its unremarkable enemy designs to its banal story, it simply doesn’t feel like it has a strong identity. However, for all its shortcomings, it does deliver seven action-packed stages of controller-gripping, shmup goodness. The ship customization stuff is neat, the energy allocation mechanic is novel, and it features some highly enjoyable boss battles. When all is said and done, I doubt Cygni will make much of an impact with the general gaming populace, but I suspect that bullet hell fans will find something to love here.
