A City Sleeps™

My review is quite redundant of other reviews. The music is great, the concept of everything being dictated by the music is great, but the flaws outweight everything that's good about it. Attacking. Dictated by the music, if there's a lull, there's a better chance of you not being able to attack and getting hit. For the fast-paced parts, you don't really notice it, but this is fairly detrimental. My number one issue: the hitbox. Your character is this huge floating body, but the hitbox is much smaller (although relatively large for this type of game), like it should be. But where is the contrast in colors? That hitbox is nearly impossible to keep track of with all the glowing enemy bullets and fast pace nature. I am a bullet hell fan, but this is a terrible bullet hell game. Of course, the music is fantastic and I will be grabbing the soundtrack.

I’m not the biggest fan of bullet hell games, so this game already had an uphill climb in terms of convincing me of its quality. While it is indeed an interesting idea to tie music to the attack patterns of your enemies, this also means that a lull in the music will reset your score multiplier to zero fairly quickly. But what hinders this game even further is the fact that in most good bullet hell shooters, you’re not actually tasked with aiming at individual enemies. You simply have to dodge the insane number of projectiles aimed at you, so introducing fairly precise aiming into the equation makes for an annoying game to play result. And I think Harmonix were aware of that problem, since you can actually slot in passive abilities such as healing stations and secondary attack units to help you with the eventual onslaught. It hints at the fact that there wasn’t a lot of consensus of where they should actually take this concept. Because the rhythm-based gameplay doesn’t add much to the bullet hell experience and at worst takes away some of the enjoyment. It also doesn’t help that my eyes immediately glazed over when I read the first paragraph of the supposed backstory of this title. Don’t pretend like there’s an actual narrative to this, it’s a score attack game with 3 levels with a bunch of different difficulty modes for each and that’s about it. And while the visuals are nice to look at initially, there’s a definite lack of animation for the enemies and the clashing contrasts make it hard to keep your eyes fixed on your own characters weak spot, which is already fairly big compared to other bullet hell games. Again, it’s a neat idea overall, but the execution isn’t to my liking at all.

As much as I like bullet hells, this one kinda falls flat. The high-contrast art style actually makes it substantially harder to differentiate anything at a glance, requiring you to look more closely at any given part of the screen to tell what's going on. Obviously, in a game where you have to at least roughly know where all the bullets and enemies are to make any informed decision about where to dodge, this is kind of hindrance. Plus, while the player character's hit box is fortunately visible, her large sprite makes it unintuitive and the health/energy UI sitting right underneath make it hard to tell at a glance where her hit box is, making dodging even more of a hassle than it needs to be. I also don't honestly think the rhythm mechanics work very well. The fact that your basic shots fire in time with the music seems like it ought to be cool, but it ends up making your primary weapon hugely unreliable. There are times where your damage output can drop significantly within the course of a second, or suddenly change from a straight shot to a spread, and there's not a whole lot you can do about it. Also the ghosts are kind of a joke. I didn't get far enough to get more than one extra ghost and relic each, but unless the first two offense-oriented ghosts are just incredibly underpowered, the healing ghost is by far the best. Its only real downside is penalizing your score a bit, which doesn't affect progression at all. If you're just trying to win, healing is always the best choice, so why even have the other ghosts?

While at first this game might appeal to your senses, that will fade quickly along with your interest. There isn’t really anything here. Very few variations in enemies, level design, weapons, and even the score lacks in the creativity department. It all becomes very dull, very quickly. I’ve played free mobile games that have more content than this. If you really feel inclined to check it out, play it for one hour...and decide if you want to return it or not. At that point, you will have had the opportunity to experience most of what this game has to offer. Which, sadly to say…isn't much.

I've made several attempts to get into A City Sleeps, and just keep bouncing off. I really [i]want[/i] to like it, but it just never clicked. Something about the control scheme or the mechanics just feels awkward, I feel like I'm flailing around rather than getting into the flow of things.

Looks good on paper sounds good in the trailer doesn't work on any of my three computers. C'est la vie?

Yes, this game does have some problems, the main ones are that you move around the screen too slowly to avoid getting hit and the game is VERY hard, but I think overall the pluses outweigh the minuses. This is yet another twin stick shooter, but it is done with a certain panache that lifts it above the other games in it's genre. The main addition is that when you shoot, music comes from your bullets, thus giving the impression that this is a music inspired shooter (the music has nothing to do with the gameplay but the sound is very good) I do like the art style and the "ghost creature" helpers that you have. Depending on which is selected, you can have either a heal burst or another shooter as your (kind of on occasion) companion, which does give the game an extra twist. I think this is worth a shot for the uniqueness of everything, it is certainly not the best shooter out there, but it is far from the worst.

A middling bullet-hell shooter with dual-stick mechanics whose soundtrack far exceeds the game itself. I found myself wanting to just listen to the music more than actually play. Several points make the game somewhat frustrating: * Your attack rate is not consistent. It is tied to the beat of the music. While usually at a good clip, there are some spots where it slows down. * Not shooting isn't really an option. When you stop tilting the stick, a significant chunk of the music goes mute, which diminishes my enjoyment of the game. * Tied in with that, dual-stick shooting gets really old really fast when you can't let up. * No bombs. You have to earn your bomb by closing to melee range at hitting enemies, which turns your ranged attack into a melee one. * Doesn't feel good. I don't really feel in-control of movement, as the game feels too sluggish to warrant the "only your core takes damage" dodges that a bullet-hell shmup demand, and using the dash is an exercise in "point in a general direction and hope you didn't point the stick one or two degrees off". I recognize that the game is themed around dreaming, and sometimes when you dream you get a floating feeling where you fly around, but you can't have that in a bullet hell. It's gotta be precise. If you can get the soundtrack alone, it's great. But I think the music is wasted on this game.

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I'm experiencing a bug that makes this game very difficult to play - the controls keep cutting out. I tried to get a fix from the devs first, but they're refusing to respond. It's a pretty looking game, and it's fun when it works, but it needs to work for me to recommend it.