I would only recommend this for advanced bullet hell players who welcome an additional challenge (or non-advanced players who don't mind the challenge).
I myself am a bullet hell games rookie -- I like the concept, but don't play them often -- and I had gone for this game thinking it would be a casual-fun shooter due to its pastel themes, but it definitely deserves its Difficult tag.
Reviews that say that the bullets are essentially invisible are all correct. But rather than a negative point, I believe this is the exact feature/difficulty that Gimel Dimension was built on and intended for.
As a rookie, I finally beat the game with the red ship, so it definitely is possible for an average player, but your mileage may vary on the enjoyment factor. Because bullets get cloaked when they blend into the background, the game challenges your peripheral vision / flash photo memory (if you know what I mean) / placement planning on top of, well, bullet hell.
Note: the bullet hells come mostly near the final couple of stages. Earlier stages play more like casual side-scrolling shooters, but you'll still die from invisible bullets if you get careless. Sometimes, going after Cells (i.e. currency that gets released after defeating an enemy) is not a good thing if it means you may run headlong into bullets you forget that the enemies left prior to being destroyed.
Here are some benefits the game puts at your disposal, which aren't very obvious at first glance. I only found them out bit by bit as I kept dying and finally squinted at the UI texts (white on pastel, urgh):
[list]
[*]Flash bomb: one chance to turn the screen completely white so that colour blending is neutralised, with several seconds of cool-down till next use.
[*]Upgrades (shield, power, magnet), which are manually triggered. Squint at the UI to see what letters you need to press to upgrade the respective attribute.
[*]When you die (i.e. lose all shields), you carry forward the Cells count as long as you continue using the same ship. While the upgrades do get reverted to square one when you die, you'd presumably restart with a much higher count of carried-over Cells so that you can buy your way to more power immediately, and hence presumably earn more Cells in your new run.
[*]If you're good, you won't even need to waste Cells to buy shields, because the game drops them after certain bosses. You can then focus solely on upgrading Power and Magnet (how easily you attract Cells) first and save your Shield upgrades for the last boss.
[*]The 3 different ships you choose at the beginning have their own bullet trajectories. It'll be useful to consider your own play style when deciding which one to use the first time while you familiarise with the game.
[/list]
I would very much have loved to know how many stages there were in the game while I was playing, so I'd know how close or far to the end each time I died. So for those curious, there are [spoiler]5[/spoiler] stages in total. I think. Was too busy using peripheral vision to catch the stage number properly. No more than [spoiler]6[/spoiler] stages. When you're dealing with the [spoiler]twin bosses[/spoiler], that's the final boss.
What I didn't like about the game:
[list]
[*]Sound effects. Music is still ok. Sound effect varieties in this game probably can be counted on one hand, and involve [b]extremely loud[/b] explosion sounds when you take damage. Since the whole premise of the game hinges on you avoiding damage, I always get a shock in each scarce case it happens. No sound balance at all.
[*]UI. Text colour suits the theme, but definitely not user-friendly. Barebones sans-serif font. And no settings to speak of.
[*]For some reason, I can't do any screenshots with F12. I presume it is part of the clunky UI/UX experience. (e.g. to pause to the menu, it is Enter, not Esc)
[*]When you die, you start all over again from Stage 1 (with the reprieve I mentioned above where your Cells get carried over). Yeah, I understand that's part of the game design, but I don't like permadeaths.
[/list]
A 5/10 for me, only because I managed to beat it.
