Devil Engine

Сайд-скролл шутер, у которого нет каких-то свежих идей для жанра, но игра весьма хороша. 👍Музыка потрясная. Не все треки мне понравились, но все приятны на слух. 👍Пиксельная графика и анимация на высоком уровне. Фоны подобраны хорошо и не отвлекают от происходящего ада на экране. За уничтожение врагов можно открыть дополнительные визуальные фильтры, некоторые из которых усложняют игру разными искажениями, а другие наоборот - убирают всё лишнее. Сложность очень высокая, а залог успеха -- запоминать откуда, когда и что вылетит т.к. рандомных атак у врагов нет (кроме боссов, конечно). Много атак противников трудно читаемы, вот ты летишь, ничего не происходит, ещё момент и в тебя влетает лазер из ниоткуда. В следующий раз уже помнишь, что будет лазер, но это такое себе дизайнерское решение... Есть и лёгкий режим, где всё медленнее, а враги стреляют реже, но и тут есть моменты, от которых очень потно. Разработчик явно недоволен этим режимом, поэтому на протяжении всей игры у вас будет висеть надпись изи мод, а при входе вас ожидает надпись “для слабаков”, ох уж этот элитизм. Миссий мало (всего 6+1 бонусная после прохождения) как и оружия, хотелось бы побольше. Да, с текущим набором можно расправиться с кем угодно, но не хватает чего-то особенного, чего не было в других аркадах.

Sounds fantastic (literally found it from Shmup Junkie using a song in one of his videos), looks great, but feels rather unsatisfying to play, even if it ultimately functions fine as a shmup. My biggest gripe by far is that the game kind of neglects its offensive toolkit with your firepower feeling barely adequate - why would you have even zakos take multiple hits, doubly so when enemies tend to speed by like they aren't paid enough to be there? Weapon selection itself is also somewhat lacking - wide shot, forward laser, homing hunter shot, that's it; no backwards shot, no ground missiles, nothing like freeway or free range (which with some balancing would be a great fit for a 16:9 shooter) of Thunder Force. This naturally means that enemies never show up from behind to break up the flow a little and bosses have to sit at the right edge of the screen - there are some creative attacks using detachable boss parts, but still, no Guardian's Knight or even just Twin Vulkan. There are bombs (really sub-weapons) to help you out a little, but these hardly feel as impactful as, say, over weapons of TF V, and are mostly here to make up a little for your lacking main weapons. Then you have another ship with lock-on lasers with locking on amounting to holding a button (and sometimes not locking onto things you'd want) and lasers often having a hard time chasing the enemies. I've expected more out of a horizontal shmup with weapon pickups than this. On the defensive side of things there's bullet absorption, which is probably the saddest take on bullet cancelling I've seen. Were these ships built out of bargain parts or something? When there are things in the genre like Border Down's break laser, which could be used for offense, defense, beam dueling bosses and midbosses, all while feeling appropriately powerful, AND is the primary scoring tool in that game when used skillfully, I can't help but feel a little disappointed when a gimmick of this kind ends up this limited. These contribute to the feeling that I've survived what the game had to throw at me rather that mounted an effective counter-attack of my own when I do succeed, making for what I couldn't really describe as good time. Still, there were some parts I've found pretty neat and fun to figure out, especially the corridor with alarms in stage 5 and the final boss - warning lasers blending into the background aside, anyways. Some other reviews touched upon memorization and sure, there's a plenty of it to do, and you will get hit by a fair few first-time killers, but you can't scare an Irem fan with that one and thus I won't count that as a negative. Be thankful you don't lose speedups and get sent to a checkpoint! A small note on presentation - despite looking great the game doesn't quite do that final leap and contextualize its environments or bosses, nor is there apparent stage continuity. I'm not asking for much, even a single sentence would be nice. There's the announcer, yet it doesn't announce anything other than your ship's basic functions. In the end, for me Devil Engine possibly felt more frustrating than a worse game would by staying on the verge of being pretty dang good but not getting there. The best time I've had with it was listening to the soundtrack without thinking of the game, so in that regard it has more in common with the ill-fated Broken Thunder than anything else Thunder Force.

Art and music are awesome. Actual gameplay is cheap and boring. Enemy bullets coming out of the background, only one real bullet option (Green) if you're in a corridor, the others seem pointless by comparison. Wiping bullets ability is fine, but on normal the bullets are so fast you can't really utilize this.