Recent reviews by Iced Cactus

It really hurts that I can't recommend this game. It cribs many visual and gameplay elements from other canonical shmups like Radiant Silvergun, Dodonpachi and Batsugun, but these elements were only understood on a surface level and their implementation is often janky, shallow, or both.

The game's sword can only be used properly when playing with an analog stick on a controller, and even with that control, its use mostly boils down to pointing it where the enemies are and launching it sometimes, paling in comparison to the depth of even a single sword from ZeroRanger, Deadlier from Hellsinker, or RSG's sword. Each ship's hyper system is also very underwhelming, only serving to make you invincible for a few seconds and dealing similar dps to just using your special weapon effectively. It could have easily been removed from the game and that damage given back into your ship's regular attacks. You don't even retain hyper progress when going to the next stage. The game has basically no macro play or resource management, requiring little to no routing to play effectively.

Bosses generally only have 2 or 3 patterns despite lasting longer than the average bullet hell boss. They're also typically very uninspired, and most of them lack the purpose or intent of a typical bullet hell's boss pattern. There's also this really weird choice to make the bullet emitters of many of these patterns decync heavily over time which, especially on hard mode, leads to me mostly just reaction dodging the blob of bullets on screen. The final boss is also just various patterns from the first 5 bosses mostly copy pasted, carrying with them all the problems they had originally.

As a decently proficient score player, this game leaves a lot to be desired. Chains carrying over to the next stage leads to you having to pretty much no miss to have even a somewhat serious score, which is insanity in a game with the conveyance issues it has. This is compounded by the poor implementation of a hard mode multiplying the score you get from long chaining and special weapon kills. This is miserable, since the game was designed around normal mode, and hard mode's universal bullet speed increase and random extra bullet emitters makes it a somewhat miserable experience. Killing as many enemies as possible with your special weapon is basically the only factor of scoring that really matters, since things such as the short chaining system and end level bonuses for health barely give you any points. The hyper system in a scoring context only really serves to dump into obviously telegraphed and suboptimal places in the level in order to get the full destruction on a level. The points gained from using it to destroy bullets for medals is negligable.

Despite these frustrations, I found the game to be way too easy, clearing hard mode in 5 hours after clearing the first two. The game lacks information on scoring, replays, or other statistics. The unlockables are underwheming, mainly just being a few codec calls and sprites I can already see in game. I got all of them within 2 and a half runs. There's no TLB after the main final boss either (Nameless Deity clears it anyways). The game just generally lacks any content or goals to strive for.

Lastly, the story just isn't very compelling, and there are many other indie shmups with more engrossing narratives. A lot of the gameplay sacrifices made for the sake of its presentation and story really were not worth what we got. Indie shmups have been doing crazy narrative stuff for decades now. This story belongs in something like a webcomic instead of a shooting game. The game also just lacks many good illustrations for things like the bosses and ships despite one of the devs being a professional illustrator with experience drawing these things.

In the end, this "sword action shooting game" doesn't really leave anything special that sticks in my mind. Many of its inspirations can be gotten on steam easily, and I never really felt that the mechanical and aesthetic ideas taken from these other shmups were excecuted better than they did, nor did it take them in new and interesting directions. Even if you want an easy and approachable modern indie shmup, just go play Blue Revolver or Zeroranger, which are games that excel in their core shmup systems while being very proficient in every other department as well. Wait for a black label or a sequel. Let this be a lesson in why you get shmup players to playtest your game, instead of the british iles game dev intifada.

Basically perfect. Definitely my favourite game from Cavanagh. If you wanna illustrate to someone why RNG in action games can be an amazing tool for adding depth, make them play this game. If you want to force your partner into trance easily, sit them down in front of this game.

if you use the custom midi playlist option, this game will make you feel like you're trapped in a Simpleflips stream.

A fun and pretty nuanced action game made by a pervert about lesbians being horny for each other. You fight your ex who used to do petplay with you and she turns you into a dog as a powerup. You're not gonna find intense routing and sequence breaks here but you will find a tight action game, which imo is better than if they half assed nonlinearity.

The best action roguelike ever made, bar none. Fixes every issue I have with games like Isaac and Gungeon and if you like those games, this one will blow your mind. It doesn't compromise the difficulty of its shmup gameplay for the sake of appealing to more people and it doesn't have weird inertia or an iframe dodge. It does all this while mixing in that indie/doujin shmup flare from games like Hellsinker, Zeroranger as well as CAVE's outings. The game also has many gameplay and story secrets to discover much like its indie inspirations, so spoilers beware! The latest update polished everything up while almost doubling the amount of content, and has really proven the devs' commitment to this project over the past 10 years.

If I were to think about all the games I've played and measured the ratio of playtime to quality of the game, this game would have the highest discrepancy by far. Repentance did a lot of bandaid fixes but the core issues from the first two DLCs and the core game itself are still there

It's been years since I've played a game with so much talent and effort put into every aspect of a game. The gameplay, art, music, narrative, voice acting are all the best Supergiant has achieved. If you're a fan of rogue likes in anyway, or like great games, or have that one friend who keeps pestering you to play it, then you'll get an insane amount of enjoyment out of it.

This game is nothing like I've ever played before. I would really, really recommend you buy it. Don't read any more reviews or info on the game. This game's suprises are ones that shouldn't be spoiled. Just play it.