Can love bloom on a battlefield? Is CYGNI: All Guns Blazing a good shoot ‘em up?
Shoot ’em up games are hard to land on when it comes to precision and enjoyability. Since the dawn of arcades, shoot ‘em ups became the go-to genre for many developers, from Taito to Konami, every single Japanese developer wanted a stake in this fun and hard-to-master genre. While our focus has shifted towards single-player games with stories, there is still a big follower base to shoot ‘em ups, especially in Japan.
With its pick it up and play nature, shoot ‘em up titles usually provide quite a steep curve when it comes to difficulty, and that is exactly why people are drawn into it. A mix of attention and quick reflexes can bring a satisfactory escape from the upcoming bullets or can be the decider if the player gets to finish the level or starts from the beginning.
Understandably, the core of shoot ‘em ups can be just the idea of shooting at upcoming enemies and evading projectiles. But in order to keep the spice, some developers needed to come up with their own ideas. IKARUGA, one of the biggest titles to get its name out, has a yin-yang approach where the ship can alter its color so as not to get hit by projectiles or damage the opposing color with higher damage output.
So the idea became “How can we just make our shoot ‘em up titles different from the next guy?” with every single release. Surprisingly, even 50-ish years later, developers can bring a different experience with their arcade titles, and KeelWorks’ debut game CYGNI: All Guns Blazing does the same thing. An experience that I barely see yet feels fresh.
CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is a shoot ’em up title with high amounts of bullet hell and RPG elements. That’s right, if you want to become better at harder levels, you need to first start as a newbie with barely any upgrades, and in every single stage you finish, you get rewarded with currency to upgrade your ship. Now, if it was the old times, the upgrades would have been dropped by the ships you take down. Those could have been stray shots, or homing missiles or rays of electricity that do damage over time.
But on CYGNI: All Guns Blazing, you can just choose which type of pattern, missile, and weapons you can use. The inclusion of customization adds another layer to the gameplay that older titles cannot replicate- well, they do replicate by attaching different weapons and stats per ship so you can choose between different characters, but CYGNI: All Guns Blazing has one ship and many different combinations to choose from.
The theme is another part of shoot ‘em ups that are considered important, to a degree where you could see subgenres of the genre, like cute ‘em ups, which says on the tin: Extremely cute characters just shooting at each other. While some games are themed after wars, CYGNI: All Guns Blazing talks about a space war between humans and aliens that suddenly tried to invade the solar system we have migrated to as a human race.
Space is one of the common themes as it is a vast place to burn your fuel and get some butt-kicking, so there is nothing wrong if developers decide to take the usual route. Because all the fanciness of the space and fast-paced movement is paid off with extremely well-done graphics. They are close to being almost real and your screen is almost always filled with enemies and explosions- which can be a double-edged sword depending on your preferences.
Since CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is a bullet hell shoot ‘em up, expect your screen to fill with projectiles that you cannot just dodge with precise movement. Even on medium difficulty, the game is brutal with barely any power-ups to help you or extra lives. Once you are dead, it is over.
However, easy difficulty can be a good starter for both people who are not familiar with the genre or want to get well with the mechanics of CYGNI: All Guns Blazing. Once upgraded, the ship- it is named ORCA by the way- should be able to tank some more or deal with enemies quicker.
Speaking of dealing with enemies, CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is a title that requires you to be cautious of both air and ground enemies. By changing the triggers, you can shoot the enemies in front of you, or the enemies below. It’s too bad you can’t shoot them both because the game tests you by sending both ground and air troops at the same time. You either have to dodge the ground units or the ones in the air to focus on one group of enemies.
This makes me believe this title really wants you to give it a shot with a co-op mode. Level designs I have come across push the idea of saying “I wish I had a teammate to deal with the other wave of enemies.” In fact, some areas were purposefully designed for co-op, where some areas would be split in half and the game would expect each player to take one path.
I have mentioned how some shoot ‘em up games differ from each other in different mechanics, and well, CYNGI: All Guns Blazing has a few of them, notably the free aim and being able to convert your powerups for either defense or attack. Let’s go one by one, starting with a free aim. Both air and ground attacks have free aim options which allow ORCA to precisely aim for targets. Do not confuse this ability with homing rockets, because they are separate attacks that come out with your regular weapon.
By using the right stick, you can give an angle to the stream of your projectiles, which helps quite a lot during boss battles or being away from a group of enemies. Ground attacks’ free aim on the other hand is a bit tricky because it allows you to aim anywhere you want. Therefore there is a high chance of not being able to give a proper aim for attacks that do not lock on smaller enemies on the ground- but bigger targets get locked on which saves a big hassle.
Interchanging between shields and special attacks is a whole new idea, at least to me. If you destroy an enemy ship or a ground unit, it has a chance of dropping a power-up. This power-up is universal and can be used as both a shield and a special attack. By clicking a button, you can trade this power up to use it as an offensive or defensive maneuver, which is a great take on giving freedom to the player.
CYGNI: All Guns Blazing includes seven stages of grief- excuse me, I meant extremely hard levels. As I said, I am fairly an okay shoot ‘em up player, titles like GUNBIRD, Raiden, IKARUGA, Darius, After Burner (Especially the arcade booth version, Climax I think it’s what it is called.) and many others have passed through my hands and I know how to handle them.
But starting with no upgrades and having barely any info about CYGNI: All Guns Blazing on medium was a huge punishment. I wouldn’t say it is a Touhou level of difficulty, as I don’t think this title reaches that level of projectile spam, it is still hard regardless of how you approach it. Arcades are meant to be fair in the beginning levels, and this game should have done the same too.
The main difficulty comes from the fact that the game is a bit hard to read. The term “read” is basically about where the projectiles are coming from or knowing where your ship is. It is extremely difficult to program your brain as the special effects, like explosions and sparks, fill up your screen quite often. For older games, the readability of bullet hell games is important as you want to keep both your ship and projectile patterns in the same field of view. Obscuring the crucial information with excessive effects kills the mood a tad bit, in my opinion.
In order to get rid of the clutter of special effects, I tried to get my game into the medium and low settings. But I guess the effects need to be there to get the aesthetics of CYGNI: All Guns Blazing out. Not to mention, some areas in levels also chuck your frames out of the window due to high amounts of enemies and projectiles on the screen, so a little optimization wouldn’t hurt the title.
Despite all the noise that is happening on the screen, the presentation of CYGNI: All Guns Blazing was very well done. Truly, something we haven’t seen before, a cinematic shoot ’em up title with deep lore and cutscenes to keep you through the stories. The soundtrack feels like a film score and delivers a grandiose feeling for the people who are experiencing the title.
The only gist I had was the fact that the game portrayed itself as a serious title but once the protagonist showed up in the cutscenes, who is a female pilot by the way, the song just changed to this upbeat, corporate-style rock that caught me really off guard. Turns out it was just to set the tone with the character since she is a young teenager and just like every young teenager, she likes basic, pop-sounding rock, I guess.
All in all CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is a terrific title for shoot ‘em up fans. It has everything they need, such as a twisting take on the gameplay, the rudimentary plot of kicking alien butt, an RPG system to make your ship your own custom weapon, and even a mandatory co-op mode for your partner or friend to enjoy the game as well. It just requires some tweaks here in there, especially in the graphics department, to be enjoyed thoroughly, but still plays and feels like any other arcade shoot ’em up.
