Tiny Bullets (Playstation)

 

 Judging by the title, I really expected Tiny Bullets to be another one of those excellent 3D shooting games secretly hiding in the Playstation library, like Gungage and Cosmowarrior Zero. Instead, it's more of a combination of Tomb Raider's meticulous 3D platforming and Resident Evil's simple "put the item in the hole" puzzle-solving. Also, the player character looks like a babyfaced Sonic gijinka.

 

So, you play as this blue spiky kid, and you're exploring ruins and caves and such (though apparently, you're meant to be running an errand for your grandmother). There's some kind of plot involving an evil wizard and his henchmen who have cool bird-face helmets, as well as a friendly dragon and some other guy that you meet on your travels. So, you jump and climb and shimmy around, trying to get to the village where the shop selling Grandma's medicine is, and also not getting killed by monsters or evil goons or your own clumsiness.

 

The platforming itself is slow and clunky, but in a way that makes it feel deliberate and satisfying. You jump with X, and hang onto ledges by holding O. You can jump up to a ledge and hold O to grab it instead of falling back down, or you can hold O while walking off of a ledge to grab it while you drop down. You can also grab ahold of vertical poles/pipes/etc., and shimmy from side to side along them, and while hanging like this, you can swing bak and forth to do a long jump forward. I'm describing this stuff in such exhaustive detail because it's a big part of what the game entails, and it's all fun and satisfying. In fact, I do kind of wish Tiny Bullets more platforming and less puzzle-solving. And no combat.

 

The puzzle solving, as mentioned already, is Resident Evil-like in nature. Find a key to open a door. Find a fuse to turn on a machine. Put the coloured tiles in the right slots in the right order to activate the ancient secret thingy. That kind of thing. It's fine, but in a game like this where it clearly wasn't a high priority for the designers (as opposed to Resident Evil, where the puzzles clearly were a higher design priority, and are much more interesting as a result), these puzzles feel more like they're just a way of making the game consume more time, rather than entertaining challenges.

 

The combat, as has been vriefly alluded to already, is bad and even more of a chore than the puzzles. The controls for it are interesting, at least. Your weapon is a slingshot, and you hold R2 to point it, then O to shoot it. The game lets you hold L2 to look around in first person, and you can hold L2 and R2 together to aim and shoot like that, which at least is nice. You can shoot at things like gongs to activate stuff in the stages, too. The problem is that the enemies just kind of potter about, they'll probably get a hit or two in on you while you're aiming, and after a couple of shots they die. Also for some reason, despite the detailed aiming mechanics, most of the enemies don't take damage if you snipe them from a distance. Like the puzzles, the combat feels like padding, and while it's happening, you'd much rather be jumping and clambering and generally navigating the environment, and it's a shame the developers didn't concentrate more on that instead. 

 

Tiny Bullets is a game that I think, had it gotten a worldwide release, would be fondly-remembered part of a lot of childhoods. Without nostalgia, though, it can only really stand on its own, and unfortunately, the good parts (the controls and the generally great way it feels to move around in this game) are heavily overshadowed by the bad parts (the pointless puzzles and boring combat). Having said that, I do wonder how beloved it is among Japanese players. I've never seen or heard any references to it anywhere, though. 

Buccanyar! (Switch)

 A quick disclaimer first: after I'd already bought a physical copy of this game, and then played it for a week and a half, I found out that it actually has a western release (though I don't think it has a physical version), under the title Cats Away. But the Japanese version (technically) has an English translation included, that's the version I've been playing, and that's the version I'm reviewing. I assume at most, the only differences will be the name and (hopefully) the translation, but bear that in mind nonetheless.

 

Anyway, I haven't seen anyone talking about this game under either title, and when I saw it on both a list of Japanese games with included English translations and on sale for a low price on a certain Japanese second hand shop's website, I picked it up. Which turns out to have been a good idea, as this is an excellent game. It's clearly been made with a lot of passion, it's unique and fun to play, and it even has an interesting, entertaining story and even more surprising: actually funny comedy scenes that manage to shine despite a pretty bad translation (kind of reminds you of what I said about Sword and Fairy 6, doesn't it?). 

 

So what the game's actually about is nautical combat! Three sisters in a flooded world have inherited a special magic ship and a map from their dad, and as they travel around to the locations marked on the map in search of dad, they get involved in a surprisingly layered plot involving a cult trying to ressurect ancient monsters, they make a lot of friends (some of whom start out as enemies), as well as a lot of discoveries about the world, their ship, and themselves. Your part in all of this is mostly split into two parts, that can be succinctly put as the combat itself, and the background management that prepares you to survive and win that combat.

 

During the management part of the game, you sail around and visit ports. In the ports, you can take on missions (pretty much always being "go here and kill these enemies") to earn money, then spend that money on ship parts. Equipping ship parts has its whole own menu full of submenus, as it's surprisingly deep. There's a lot of different weapon types, as well as a lot of different ship designs, which eah have a different amount of spaces for putting weapons of different sizes, with some also having their own powerful bewpoke weapons built in. You also get to equip smaller boats, aircraft, and subs that can be deployed from your ship mid-battle. These are interesting too, as while most of them are just there to attack enemies, some of them will go around picking up items dropped by sunk foes, others might be fishing boats that catch fish you can sell for a little extra money, and so on. And of course, you also have to hire sailors (who are all cats, for some reason) to actually man all these guns and pilot all these little vehicles.

 

The combat itself is somewhat unique. All of your weapons just repeatedly fire and automatically aim once you've given the order to open fire, so your part in the battle is to actually control the ship itself: positioning yourself to hit the enemy better, and to avoid incoming attacks, especially the powerful special attacks that come from big boss enemies. You also decide when to deploy the aforementioned little vehicles (which then act autonomously), as well as giving commands to repair the ship, and switch between your three loadouts of weapons, depending on the circumstances. As the game goes on, you'll also get access to magic attacks, so you decide when to use those and which ones to use, too.

 

It took me a while to get into Buccanyar!, but once I did, it really got its claws into me. I've been having a ton of fun with it, and despite the poor translation, getting engrossed in its world, story, and characters. As well as being a great game on its own, it's also a nice thing to see in the wider landscape: a new(-ish) commercial game that's been made with a lot of love, that's both original and fun to play, and which doesn't have a single piece of nickel-and-diming or dark design patterns in it. It's just a great, old-fashioned, well-designed game that stands on its own. I can easily and unreservedly recommend it, and I don't think I'll get much disagreement if I say that it's exactly the kind of thing I want to see from longform-style videogames in the future: honest creativity and no scams or desperate trend-chasing.

Pocket of Horror: Lighthouse (Game Boy Color)

 This is a demake of World of Horror, a game I haven't yet played (though I'm sure I will eventually), but which drew me in simply for the novelty of being a horror game made for Game Boy Color. Because I haven't played its inspiration, I can only judge it as a game in its own right, and am unable to compare the two. 

 

It uses a few elements that it seems like a lot of the new wave of Game Boy Color games use, no matter the genre: full-screen pixel art, abstract menu-based gameplay, and tastefully restrained colour palettes. I don't know if that's because the tools being used to make these games favour them, or if it's some kind of leftover resentment from western GBC-owning kids from the olden days of never getting to play the likes of Sakura Taisen GB or Hana Yori Dango: Another Love Story in English, now driving them to make their own GBC adventures with their own fancy pixel art.

 

So, how Pocket of Horror works is that you choose one of four mysteries to investigate. Then you'll be told a little story, through full screen art, little "investigating" animations, and text. Sometimes, you'll get to choose on of two options, and sometimes you'll find yourself fighting enemies. These battles feature yet more full screen art of your foe, and you have a bunch of options to pick, such as attacking, defending, trying to restore your stamina or reason, and so on. Whenever you pick an action, a bar at the bottom of the screen fills up a little bit, and when it fills all the way, he enemy attacks. You can usually just attack wildly and kill the enemies before they do the same to you, though since I died partway through the fourth mystery, that might be a poor plan in the long term.

 

After each mystery's solved, you get a key, and all four are needed to open the way to the lighthouse, where the final mystery lies. I can't spoilt the details of that final mystery for you, because I haven't been able to survive all four mysteries. You've got three numbers to keep track of as you play: stamina, reason, and doom. Stamina and reason obviously represent your physical and mental health respectively, and if either reaches zero, it's game over. Doom, however, is more mysterious. It's a percentage that goes up or down a little bit every time you do something. It was in the mid-forties when my playthrough ended, and I'm left curious about what might happen if it gets to a full hundred.

 

This is a decent enough little game, and definitely worth a bit of your time. I'm really interested in the rennaisance that the Game Boy and Mega Drive in particular have been going through in recent years, so there'll probably be more coverage of both consoles here in the future. It's not a 100% correlation, but it's interesting that a lot of new Mega Drive games are action titles, and a lot of new Game Boy games are like this: adventures that focus on making decisions and really pushing quality of presentation above all.

Battle Athletess Daiundokai GTO (Playstation)

 While looking up which came first out of the Battle Athletess anime and videogames, I found something surprising: it was neither! It originated as a radio drama! Then, the Saturn game was released before there was an anime. That Saturn game, is, I believe, a kind of girl-raising sim in the vein of Princess Maker or Graduation, and has never been translated into English. I guess they wanted to go a little more mainstream for this Playstation release, though, since it's a much more accessible (and less language dependent) racing game!

 

Being about athletes(s), they aren't utilising any kind of vehicles, instead running on foot! Unlike a lot of leg-based racing games, there's no athleticism required from the player in the form of high speed button-tapping. Instead, your selected runner goes at a consistent speed, and instead your focus as the player is on a couple of other matters. The first is avoiding the various obstacles strewn about the stages by going round them, jumping over them, or sliding under them. The second is management of your runner's stamina. You can hold up on the d-pad to run faster (or in the case of one character, ride a bike that appears from nowhere), which depletes your stamina meter. When it's all gone, your runner will stop for a few seconds to catch their breath.

 

All of this is presented in very colourful and charming 3D, and it's the presentation that's clearly the selling point here. There's definitely a lot of affection for the characters in the game: they're all voice acted, of course, and there's nice little touches like how when you lose in single player mode, the "continue?" countdown will be said out loud by the character who defeated you. They all each have their own stages, too. The cast is an international one, and the stages are all from the Street Fighter II school of harmless national stereotypes: the Russia stage is snowy and has nice architecture, the China stage takes place atop the great wall, the Japan stage is slightly futuristic and surrounded by neon signs, and so on. The protagonist is exempt from this, being Japanese, but having a stage that's in a place that looks like a mural painted on a nursery wall. (Japan is the only country represented by two characters). Finally, each character also has a semi-secret (and usually a little strange) pose that they adopt if you pause the game, no matter what they're doing at the time.

 

It's a pretty fun game! It'd probably be even moreso if played with other people (and, had I known about it back then, I can easily see it being in the rotation of versus games in my teenage bedroom around the turn of the century). The only real problem is that it's also very slight, and there's not really a lot of variation. The various playable characters don't really feel any different from each other, and though all the stages look different, and the obstacles on them have unique models and textures, mechanically, the only real difference between them is the way the obstacles are laid out. Even just having one unique element for each stage would have added a lot to the game. Maybe a special ability for each character, too. Still, as it is, it's still okay. You'll get a little bit of fun out of it on your own, and probably a lot more with opponents. It's also a very lovingly made game with a lot of charm, and I think that's worth something, too. I think it's worth a look for the curious at the very least.

Skate Attack (PS2)

 As a publisher, Midas were famous mainly for two things: localising occasionally interesting Japanese budget games, and also publishing mostly-terrible original budget games. Skate Attack isn't one of the former, so my hopes for it weren't high. But I tried it anyway, being the fair-minded person that I am, and for a little while, I was pleasantly surprised! On initial inspection, this seems like not just a competent game, but one that's actually fun to play!

 

It's a skateboarding game that mostly plays and feels a lot like the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games at the most basic level. You skate around, there's quarter pipes to launch you up into the air, doing flip tricks with the square button, and grab tricks with the circle. There's also lots of rails and ledges to grind on, though Skate Attack uses R1 for this, rather than triangle. You can even do a manual upon landing, to lengthen your combos! Aesthetically, it clearly takes a lot of influence from Jet Set Radio, being set in a brightly-coloured near-future sci-fi city.

 

So, it seems like, with some pretty decent influences, and well-constructed fundamentals, that this is a game whose development was backed by real passion, and not just a cheap cash-in. But you might be wondering why, back in the first paragraph, did I specify that I was pleasantly surprised "for a little while"? Well, the answer to that (as well as the answer as to why all of the screenshots are from the same area) lies in the game's structure. The game's plot sees an evil robot demon thing named Virus forcing you to do a bunch of tasks. A big bunch of tasks. The first area, for example, has twenty-one of them, in three sets of seven. 

 

It's clear, too, that the developers quickly ran out of ideas for skateboarding-related tasks for you to do, too, since you'll soon be fighting evil robots, flying around atop stolen and fiddly-to-control drones, and other tedious nonsense. It's such a shame, because like I said, the actual skateboarding is really great, way above what you'd expect from a Midas original, and it even has a potentially interesting unique element in the grappling laser thing that lets you zoom onto the rooves of vehicles from a distance. But all these other psuedo-action game tasks are incredibly fiddly and annoying, and no fun at all.

 

Though Skate Attack turned out to be a disappointment after initially seeming to have so many things in its favour, it does appear that the developers made another skateboarding game: Skate Park City on PSP. The game's description on GameFAQs even also mentions THPS and JSR as influences, so I'll definitely be looking into that, to see if it realises the potential seen in this game. Unfortunately, whether it does or not, this is a review of Skate Attack, which is itself a game I don't recommend.

Gekifu Bakegyamon Ayakashi Fighting (DS)

 This is a game I've been meaning to write about for a long time, and finally, I'm getting around to it (the roadblock being that I misplaced my original DS and have now finally got ahold of a gizmo that can satisfactorily emulate the DS and take screenshots while doing so. Unfortunately, the 3DS can only do one of those things at the same time.) It's a licensed fighting game (based, unusually, on a manga that didn't get an anime adaptation), though while the fashion of the time was to make such things in the style of Smash Bros., this at least appears to be more of a traditional 3D fighting game, though it quickly becomes clear that it's quite a bit more experimental than that.

 

If you start playing with story mode, then the controls will probably be the first weird thing you encounter. There's only one attack button, that can be repeatedly pressed for a short beat em up-like combo. There's also a jump button, a special move button, and a button to crouch and pick up cards off the ground. And you block with the right shoulder button. Those cards, then: you start a match with four of them, and can hold up to eight. They're kept on the touchscreen, and you touch them to activate them, each one representing a different spell. Some are big powerful elemental attacks, others temporarily increase your stats, or decrease those of your opponent.

 

That's not all, as as soon as you win or lose a round, you'll encounter the next weird thing: every fight is a King of Fighters-style elimination battle between teams of three. Furthermore, the manga upon which the game is based is apparently a kind of horror-themed pokemon-type deal, so all the characters are monsters, mainly youkai-type guys. (Maybe they're all youkai? It's a little outside my realm of expertise. But there's tengu and kappa, at least). And of course, each team is acting as the proxy for some kid. Oddly, in free battle mode, you pick a kid, and then you can form a team out of all the monsters you've so far unlocked, while in story mode, each kid has a predetermined trio of monsters. Which makes me wonder what the point of picking a kid in free battle is. Just flavour, or does each kid have specialities of their own?

 

So, it's different, but is it actually good? Kind of. It won't be your new favourite handheld fighting game or anything, and I actually did get a little bored of it after a few attempts at getting through story mode on a single credit, as well as a bunch of trying out different monsters in free battle. (Since story mode only lets you play as the protagonist, and his set team, until you unlock more characters). But it's definitely unique, and the novelty of playing as monsters and casting spells during the fights does have its appeal. Apparently the manga did get an official English translation, so fans of that might want to pick up a copy, and if you've never read it (like me), you might still want to give it a look, just for how weird and interesting it is. It is definitely more weird and interesting than it is actually good, though.

Old Coin Pusher Friends 3 (Switch)

 In real life, coin pushers are a hated scourge, the disease that has overrun and essentially killed off everything fun and interesting in the UK's seaside arcades. But when I noticed there was a series of videogame adaptations of the concept, my curiosity was piqued: how would you turn such a simple concept, that's so reliant on physicality and prizes into a videogame that is inherently unable to offer either? The price was a mere pittance, so I gave the newest one a look.

 

Old Coin Pusher Friends 3 does it by having a simple board game happening at the top of the screen, with the coin pushing happening at the bottom. In the board game part, there's a guy journeying to visit the 52 stations of the Tokaido, and he moves according to dice that you win from the coin pusher game below. There's special spaces along the way, like a palanquin that'll carry the guy an extra distance, baskets of coins that rain into the pusher, enemy spaces, and more.

 

Enemies stop the journey while you fight them. You see, you don't drop coins into a slot to get them into the coin pusher, you shoot them from a gun! So when there's an enemy, you point the game upwards and try to kill the enemy before time runs out and they leave on their own. Beat them, and a bunch of treasures will drop into the pusher. There's two different upgrade shops in the game: one where you buy upgrades with your coin supply, and another where you buy upgrades with magatama. When you reach one of the stations, all the treasures you collected since the last one get turn into magatama at a rate of one for every four treasures.

 

As well as coins, dice, and treasures, there's also koban (you know, those oval-shaped gold coins, like what Meowth has on its head). Because while you're playing, there's a jackpot counter that increases for every coin you shoot. Get seven koban, and jackpot mode activates, during which coins and treasures will constantly rain down from the 'bove, until the number of coins that's fallen has reduced the jackpot counter to zero. If you're smart (and lucky), you'll eventually be playing in an almost constant state of jackpot mode, which is nice.

 

Old Coin Pusher Friends 3 is an odd little game. It's cheap, and I think it'll take about thirty to forty hours to complete. Furthermore, despite being an adaptation of a (low level) gambling machine conceptually, there's not much in the way of dark patterns in its design: it actually has an end, there's no real money shop or any extra stuff to buy after you have the game at all, in fact, and there's no imperative to check in every day. There's unlockables, both the aforementioned upgrades as well as a few optional cosmetics, but you'll have unlocked them all after a few stages. If the game sounds interesting to you, pick it up. It's not anything spectacular, but it's a decent enough way to semi-mindlessly occupy your hans while watching TV or whatever.

The Great Waldo Search (Mega Drive)

 Under normal circumstances, I'm a defender of short games. One of my most-loved games is the Mega Drive port of Altered Beast, and with a bit of practice, you can reliably get through it in under ten minutes. Something a little different, however, is The Great Waldo Search: the first time I loaded it up, I'd seen the ending in a similarly short time. I didn't measure it, but I was sure it was under twenty minutes. Then a few days later, I did it again to take screenshots, and the time stamps in the file names of those screenshots revealed my completion time: eight minutes from title screen to ending!

 

Thanks to the American obsession with pointlessly changing the names of things, it might not be immediately obvious from the title that this is a game based on the Where's Wally books (or possibly, the TV cartoon that was also based on them, since there's a beepy-boop over of that show's theme song. Rather than just put Wally into a generic platform game, I can say that they at least tried something a bit more interesting in attempting to turn the "finding stuff in a busy picture" gimmick of the books into a videogame. Unfortunately, I think the developers were a little ahead of their time on this.

 

The problem is that the technology isn't really up to the task. It's not just the Mega Drive's fault, but I think this kind of game is one of very few that really needs to have a HD display to work. Remember all those hidden object games that old women were playing about ten to fifteen years ago? They wouldn't have worked on an old standard definition TV, either. So, there's a few stages, in which you're tasked to find Wally himself and a scroll belonging to his friend Wizard Whitebeard. There's also points items and clocks, to give you extra time (as the time limit is your only foe). Wally's dog Woof is also there, taking you to a magic carpet flying, bone-collecting bonus stage (bone-us stage) when you find him. Come to think of it, you could eschew Woof and finish the game even more quickly if you don't care about points.

 

All except the final stage are fantasy-themed, and somewhat oddly, most are also battle-themed. There's a war between two factions of wizards/monks/cultists, people fighting against dragons in a cave system, an arabian nights-type stage, and a village defending themselves against giants. The final stage is a "trick" one, similar to one seen in the books, where there's many Wallies, and you have to find the real one, identified by his striped socks. There's little bits of looping animation in the stages, but nothing actually moves around, which might have made things more interesting/frustrating. I assume it would have been difficult to have that many sprites moving around the screen at once, though, and presumably everything that isn't a findable item is part of the background.

 

The Great Waldo Search isn't a game I can recommend. It's absurdly easy, it's not interesting or exciting in any way, and the best thing that can really be said about it is that at least it won't bore you for a long time. I'm curious as to how many copies it sold, I can't imagine there were many happy customers paying probably £40 for this. The closest I can find to a release date is December 1992, which adds even more absurdity: Sonic 2 had been released just the previous month! 

Wonder Trek (Playstation)

 Among the many prominent and exciting translation patches that have been released in recent times, it feels like Wonder Trek kind of fell by the wayside, and didn't really get the attention it deserved. Which is strange, since I'm sure a basic description of what kind of game it is has at least one element that appeals to a wide range of different tastes and interests: it's an isometric open world metrovania with Prince of Persia-esque platforming, 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds, and Dizzy-style "use the item in the right place" puzzles.

 

You play as an explorer, accompanied by an elderly professor, exploring a jungle island. There's lots of animals, many of whom will attack you, and you fight back by hitting them with a piko hammer until they get annoyed and run away. Sometimes there's plants that'll attack you, too! Sometimes, an animal will talk and ask for help, like the giant catfish with an upset stomach who asks you to go inside and fix it. It turns out that he's inadvertantly swallowed an ancient golden harp. Plus he's also full of aggressive parasitic worms.

 

It's the open world element that really impresses in Wonder Trek. When you start playing, you'll find a set of giant bird footprints going down a particular path away from your camp, encouraging you to go that way. But you really don't have to! Once I'd figured this out, I started going down the other paths and found all kind of interesting things: a spider-infested fungus forest, a dungeon with traps and seemingly man-made traps in a volcano, a very aggressive pitcher plant (which was also a boss I've not yet been able to beat), and more! Most importantly, every path I took either resulted in my reeiving an item that could be used to go further down a different path, or a dead end where a specific item is obviously necessary to go further. So it's a game that's actively designed around encouraging exploring the world its built for you.

 

The movement and platforming were both a little surprising, too, and they take a little getting used to. I call this an isometric game rather than a 3D one despite the world being made of polygons because the camera is always in that same position diagonally above you, plus you can only move in the four cardinal directions, but shifted forty-five degrees. So every time you load it up and start playing, there'll probably be a few seconds where you re-orient yourself with which cardinal on the D-pad correlates to which diagonal for your character's movement. When you're paniccing in some of the more complex platforming/climbing situations, you're also likely to wiggle the pad a little, attempting to make precise movements in directions that don't exist in the game. Or at least I did.

 

As for the platforming, like I said: it's kind of like Prince of Persia in 3D. You can jump a certain distance and height, and the distance is a little further if you're running when you do so. You can also grab onto the edges of platforms and vlimb up onto them after jumping, as well as climbing down to grab onto the edge of the platform on which you're standing, to drop down a little more safely. Sometimes, there'll be something high up that the professor wants to see, and you have to escort him there. He's not as agile or strong as you when it comes to jumping and climbing, so how this works is that whenever you're hanging from the edge of something, he can jump far/high enough to cling to your back and you can then climb up with him on you. It mainly just makes things a little more time-consuming, and it's a slightly unusual take on the concept of the escort mission. But it is still an escort mission, and those are always worse than just letting the player get on with things.

 

Though it's got a few little shortcomings, like escorting the old man every now and then, Wonder Trek is a game that's definitely worthy of your time and attention. It's fun, interesting, and full of charm. I don't really have much more to say about it: seek it out, and play it!

Angelian Trigger (Switch)

 Space Harrier is obviously an excellent game, but since the hard of thinking like to assume that there's no place for sprite scaling in a world with polygons, and that there's no place for rail shooters when free roaming flight sim-style shooters exist, there hasn't been a lot of iteration on its principles over the years, not by SEGA nor by anyone else. But Pixel, who made a name for themselves with Flame Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei, a game in another genre considered dead and obsolete by the ill-informed, the single plane beat em up, took on the task a couple of years ago with Angelian Trigger.

 

Just looking at screenshots, you can see one thing that this game has going for it: it looks amazing. Most of the graphics are made up of high resolution sprites, with those used for the player characters also being lavishly animated. There's some enemies (mainly robotic ones) that are represented by polgyonal models, but most of the enemies, as well as the stages themseves are super-sharp sprites. That aside, most of the other things the game does to build upon the basic concept put forth by Space Harrier are apparently attempt to "modernise" the genre, for better and worse.

 

There are two playable characters to choose from whenever you play, and they are actually different to each other: one can fly around the screen like the Harrier of lore and legend, while the other runs along the ground, but can double jump to evade ground hazards and shoot at airbound enemies, and does all these things a lot more quickly. There are also two modes in which to play: arcade and story. The game's clearly been designed with story mode in mind, though, with arcade put in as a concession to those who prefer purely skill-based play in their shooting games.

 

Arcade mode is what you'd expect: you pick a character and then you play through all of the stages in order, until you complete the game or get killed. However, there are twenty-four stages spread across six planets, and each stage is about five minutes long. So playing through arcade mode means concentrating on shooting and avoiding stuff for two solid hours! By contrast, story mode lets you start from any planet you've previously reached (even if you reached it in arcade mode!), and it also has unlockable permanent upgrades. It also has lots of cutscenes between stages, though they are mercifully skippable.

 

The big gameplay gimmick the game has to offer is the HDCPC meter, and its various uses. It slowly charges over time, and when it's full, you can press a button to spend it in one of three ways: projecting a shield over yourself to pretect you from a single hit, summoning a robot buddy to fly around and shoot enemies until you take damage, or shooting a load of homing beams at every enemy currently onscreen. The shield is he most important one, and it feels like success in the game hinges upon keeping it up as much as possible. There's also times when the homing beams are very useful, too, of course. The kindest thing to do regarding the robot buddy is to move on without mentioning its relative usefulness.

 

Angelian Trigger isn't a perfect successor to Space Harrier and the neglected genre it represents, but it is a game that's decently fun enough to play, and the more I've played it, the more I've grown to like it. It's definitely worth your time, I think. What's weird about it, though, is that in a bizarre circumstance from days gone by, it's a Japan-only release, on Switch at least (I think there's an international release on PC). Did you even know that that kind of nonsense still happened, outside of tie-ins to gameshows and the like? There's obviously no language barrier though, unless you really want to know what's being said in the cutscenes.