BLACK BIRD
BLACK BIRD has easily been one of my biggest shmup related surprises of the year. I follow shmup releases as close as possible and as a result I feel that I’m aware of most upcoming STGs on Steam. The first time I heard about this game was around the time CAVE employees streamed it on their Twitch channel. I came across it again by chance in the 2018 Winter Sale and decided to purchase it.
This game is the debut of Japanese indie developer Onion Games on Steam. I’m not familiar with them but evidently they’re known for a few games including Million Onion Hotel. BLACK BIRD’s story is about a little girl that dies in the street. After dying she is reborn as a crow and starts to destroy everything. The story, graphics, music, and environments are all well designed. I’d call it almost a steam punk style opera type of aesthetic. When I originally saw the game on CAVE TV the style didn’t connect with me, but when I actually played the game I enjoyed it.
– Real player with 14.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Bullet Hell Shoot 'Em Up Games.
Imagine a remake of Fantasy Zone with Tim Burton’s flavor of adorable bleakness, japanese attention to gameplay detail and quirkiness. The game starts with a young girl reborn from despair as a Black Bird to destroy the world. The more you kill, the bigger and more powerful you’ll grow. This dark premise is offset by cute spritework, silly animations and a very eccentric soundtrack. It’s just a delight to consume the cruel world, which left you to die. The gameplay and its scoring is well tuned. The player is constantly managing risk, reward and greed. Nuking a whole screen at max combo with a completely pumped up bird is the most satisfying climax very few shoot ‘em ups manage to pull off. The first play through is easy mode and completion unlocks the slightly harder true mode. Online leader board for global score chasing just adds to the replay value.
– Real player with 12.8 hrs in game
Calturin
This is a really awesome game!
There are some bugs, but not game breaking, and they have to be triggered intentionally.
It took me about 2.5 hours to complete (only the green portals).
It has very good voice acting and awesome sound effects.
The pixel art style also fits the game and it’s story very well.
The only thing I would change would be the bosses. With each portal their attacks get stronger, but they aren’t harder beat necessarily. Some attacks are stronger but easy to dodge. The dragon for example is very easy to defeat, compared to the bull? before, which is a little bit harder, or the knight at the beginning.
– Real player with 49.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Bullet Hell Story Rich Games.
This is a nice little game.
Do be aware that it is short, around 2 hours to complete the main game, and double that to complete all the challenges.
On my first playthough, I was on the fence about liking the game but midway through the game picks up and becomes pretty fun. I really like the graphics although they do seems somewhat amaturish at time or lacking some small amount of polish that I cant put my finger on. That being said I really love the title screen art and the player sprites. The combat is pretty simple which is good for this type of game(shoot, blink, heal).
– Real player with 42.6 hrs in game
Thy Creature
‘Thy Creature’ is a story game where a Creature goes on an adventure to a distorted tower.
Reality and memories are jumbled up in this tower, and the Creature needs to make its wish come true. Help the Creature escape the labyrinth and barrages, the byproducts of his memories, so that it can climb up the distorted tower.
‘Thy Creature’ is an adventure game adapted from Mary Shelley’s novel, ‘Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus’.
An unknown tower the Creature must climb
The severely injured Creature, that managed to get away from the humans, enters the tower…
To make his earnest wish come true.
Bizarre events in the tower
The Creature arrives at the tower which has turned into an eerie place where reality and memories are mixed together.
It needs to avoid the attacks of its distorted memories and make its way through many other memories to find memory fragments.
Will the Creature manage to overcome these odd challenges and reach the top of the tower?
Questionable tower residents
Who are the residents in this eccentric, distorted tower?
The Creature will come across residents with different stories as it makes its way up the tower…
It needs their help to go up. But the question is, will they help?
** Transcendental beings on the way up**
Transcendental beings occupy each floor.
The Creature must experience peculiar events and adversities that are caused by these beings.
Where did they come from, and why are they occupying the tower?
The truth that lies ahead
Do you think the Creature’s wish will come true?
What is the truth that lies ahead?
Read More: Best Bullet Hell Visual Novel Games.
DEMON’S TILT
The Developer has proved that the impossible can be achieved; to actually refine an already perfect game and make it even better with every subsequent update. Pinball goes back decades and the game that Demon’s Tilt is based on is actually around almost thirty years old. The Pc Engine hosted some amazing shooters (including it’s almost arcade perfect version of R-Type), Gunhed and the aforementioned Devil Crash, which was the best occult themed pinball game ever created and nothing could ever come close UNTIL Demon’s Tilt emerged nearly three decades on the heels of Devil Crash. Three decades is a very long time to wait for a worthy successor and surprisingly, nobody tried to replicate or improve on Devil Crash until now…first enter the developer of Demon’s Tilt and later the publisher who came on board and the game went from being pretty special to nigh-on-perfect with scaling, rotation, tons of large hand drawn sprites, shmup elements and the occult. Wow, this is like winning the lottery and every time you play this utterly stunning pinball game you are constantly rewarded with more discoveries and higher scores. The table is good stretching up three screens high and the mood is dark but when things liven up it does get hectic and very colourful. The music is straight out of a Megadrive/Genesis but the core game remains true to the Devil Crash formula. Occult pinball just got better and gets better with every update, the developer has to be seriously applauded for making the impossible happen, can you get better than perfect? He has proved that you can with a resounding YES. Every update of Demon’s Tilt either tweaks or adds something new. And we haven’t even left EA yet. For the price, you get the best pinball on Steam and for your time, you get happy memories created in seriously wanting to beat your high score again and again. Going retro with Occult Pinball with hints of Saturn, Neo Geo, and Playstation thrown in. The epitome of the perfect video pinball game 100/100 and it just keeps on getting better.
– Real player with 31.1 hrs in game
DEMON’S TILT
DEMON’S TILT is a retro-stylized pinball on a huge 3 sections table. I’ve played with Xbox controller and I believe it’s much more comfortable than keyboard for this game.
I can say only positive things about DEMON’S TILT:
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Gameplay is very addictive and the game is a great fun for short playsessions
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Cool music/sound effects
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Game looks really good + there’s plenty of settings to adjust visuals/colours
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I’m not super impressed by bosses in a current state, but the whole table in general is absolutely awesome.
– Real player with 22.6 hrs in game
Retromancer
This game is awesome! The speed and progression are excellent. The difficulty is just right. The graphics are flashy and the game has that unknown thing, that soul and mystique that make playing through it so good. Robotron lovers need to get this game now.
– Real player with 4.1 hrs in game
TL;DR: A good time-waster if you can get it on sale.
What I like is that it has a progression system to the powerups. Yes it feels a little tacked-on, but I don’t mind chasing the upgrades.
The game is competent, and the levels are enjoyable with good variety. However I find the graphics all look the same so you can’t distinguish your avatar from the projectiles, from the enemies, the enemy projectiles, etc. It is all a big phony retro blur.
I played it for about 1.5 hours before I grew weary. Probably wouldn’t have lasted that long but I’m a sucker for twin-stick shooters.
– Real player with 3.3 hrs in game
Halloween is Crazy as Hell
Halloween is Crazy as Hell is a roguelike and bullet hell game, where you can have weapons that are completely different from each other with different special abilities, as well as items and little friends that will help you on your journey.
Game Content:
The Curse: Recently, a black font spell was created and then praised for evil. It’s powerful, it can make the Sun never rise again, allowing the moon to have the power at the top. The darkness allows the Halloween creatures rise to the surface, with the exception of introverts, who still prefer the underground anyway.
The Weapons: They are all empowered with the Curse, each one carrying a charge of “Super”, a still mysterious element that allows them to release the secret abilities of the weapons.
The Mission: Simple, but hard as bone. Find and destroy the source of this dark magic, and destroy all the altars that contain part of this magic along the way.
The journey is long, several friends will show up to help (at least the most of them). Help to end with it. No one can stand walking around and stepping on a pumpkin and slipping and falling to the ground anymore, no one can stand stumbling over bony legs and falling to the ground anymore, no one can stand anymore being frightened by shadowy bats and falling to the ground! This Halloween is Crazy as Hell!
SOL DIVIDE -SWORD OF DARKNESS-
SOL DIVIDE! The game that first got me into Psikyo shmups! With City Connection and Zero Div doing all these Psikyo ports, it’s like just shut up and take my money! What perfect ports too! A company after my own heart. I have such a personal connection to these games…thank you!
– Real player with 19.5 hrs in game
“Sol Divide” is a difficult, boring game with bad animation, poor 90’s CGI graphics, flimsy story, forgettable soundtrack, and with almost nothing to do. There are few variances between enemies and even fewer differences in how they attack. Gameplay is suffocating given the size of the sprites compared to the available screen space. Getting hit is practically unavoidable; the challenge is whether you can hang on long enough before advancing to the next level.
The developers have done a great job, as usual, including the option to tune difficulty, lives, and continues to your level of skill, but this doesn’t save “Sol Divide” from its poor design.
– Real player with 1.5 hrs in game
The Holy Silence
You wake up from a deep sleep with a terrible headache, and you see the dark, empty subterranean base.
You are saved by a traveler, from whom you learn that the world has experienced a disaster later called ‘The Holy Silence’. The sun suddenly disappeared, the world became dark, and the creatures and environment have changed beyond understanding.
Five races were born in the world, and humans became the common target of the new races. The combined strangling of ‘The Holy Silence’ and the five races made mankind retreat successively, and finally retreated to the underground base in order to survive.
Book of the Old
The Old, will Return
A puppet somehow has its own will, accidentally summoned a mystical soul from the Otherworld.
Now they are trapped in a mysterious manor.
What is behind all this, and what is awaiting these two souls?
The answer lays in the Book of the Old.
A Roguelike shooting game
Dodge enemies’ bullets and shoot them! Every time you start a journey, it will be all new!
Adventure deeper, and new maps, enemies, stories will appear.
Decide you own adventure plan – do you prefer easy maps, or dangerous ones with high benefits?
Equipment? No, they are cards!
Collecting coins after cleaning rooms. Use coins to get powerful cards, or keep the coins for interest – if you are not killed by powerful enemies.
The altar will provide 5 cards each time for you to pick, and you can refresh them all if there is no your target card – of course you should pay for that.
3 same cards will became higher ranked card, witch can assist you fighting more powerful enemies.
Each card has two forms of ability and two bonds. With 80 cards and 32 bonds, it’s up to your wisdom and imagination how powerful you can be.
What’s that monster?
80 monsters and 23 bosses, every of them has its unique skill and action.
Some of them can even cooperate.
Be careful, every single kind of these monsters is fatal!
This is a roguelike game with infinite possibilities.
What is your road, you decide.
Cosmophage
Love this game. Does a great job of easing you into a chaotic bullet hell. The music makes it feel that much more intense which puts a unique and needed flare to the genre. Challenging, but rewarding!
– Real player with 2.8 hrs in game
At first I thought “hmm, this is pretty easy!” - no, it gets harder. Sound track is on point, too!
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game