[h1] A stylish, fresh arcade spin into the horde-like survivors genre that had room to be more! (7.6/10) [/h1]
Hayai is pretty enjoyable, from what I've played of it. Time slow-mos are always a cool concept in games, and I think this game manages to dish it out with style. Mouse-drawing to make a path where you slash everything in your way is quite a charming flair for a game like this, that I simply haven't seen before.
I might be doing a bit of a disservice to the "bullet heaven" / "survivors" genre here by even calling it one of those, since there's not really any weapon upgrades or whatever here, but you DO fight against a constantly spawning horde of enemies, so in that regard, it's similar.
Speaking as an average player though, I don't think anyone can feasibly expect to survive for more than 3 minutes, in general (unlike the 30m you'd expect from survivors). I'd say in most of my runs I die somewhere between 30 seconds and 90 seconds in myself! It's quite a tough, brutal game, and I wish it wasn't so. But in the end, this is an arcade game, where you're here for the fun main mechanics and chasing scores while you're at it, and I think this might be more engaging than some other arcade games I have in my library, so there's that. It's just paced differently.
If you are curious about how scoring works here, let me break down my observation: Killing 1 enemy in general gives 50 to your score, and 4 or less enemies in one swoop does nothing different except multiplying it per enemy count. But killing 5 in one go gives an extra "+50 score bonus" on top of 250 you would normally get, which I figured to come from "5 times 10", where 10 is the base bonus. 6 gives an extra 120, which is 6 times 20 as the base bonus. Every single enemy here onwards, seemingly will increase the “base bonus” score by 10, multiplied by the actual enemy count that you killed for total bonus score. This is why killing 18 enemies gives around 2K in bonuses, while 34 gives 11K. (If you don't believe me, you can grab a calculator and do the calculations whenever the screen tells you about your combos next time)
So with that scoring system in mind and the exponential growth potential of it, of course, if you are going for high scores, then the whole game becomes an interesting balancing act of "keeping as many enemies alive as possible to kill them all in one delicious slash", while also "surviving and keeping in mind that death is a moment away". It's fun and somewhat stressful at times. Knowing that doubling your killcount can give you quadruple your score is insane, but it's a good idea to just aim for 30-50 killcounts in general imo.
There's only four types of enemies here really. Straw hats, Armored Samurai Warlords(?), Tengu Masks, and Archers. I'd say their attacks are quite brutal though, since even the straw hats, the easiest and most common out of the four, can perform three successive dashes and even changing directions midway depending on where you are. This is not an issue if you're just facing one, but there is a gimmick of the game that makes this move terrifyingly deadly, which I'll elaborate under cons.
[h3]Information:[/h3]
[b](•)Achievements are relatively easy.[/b] I don't think that's bad. Probably 1-2 hours to get everything done. As another review states, the scores and leaderboards are there to entice you to push yourself, for better or worse. I think getting 80k on each character, and getting a combined 500k, is good enough of a personal goal for me, which I have pretty much achieved.
[b](•)Game does have 5 distinct 'ronin' (characters).[/b] I would say that the girl (Tomoe) is simply the best and none other comes close, but honestly, the basic starting one (Kazuya) is actually pretty good, along with Hideyoshi. Tomoe struggles a bit in the late game, but my high score on her is 200k, and I got 80K on the other two, so idk what to say.
I think the other 2 ronins (Oda and Masashige) have major downsides though, being that Oda's Bonus Score gets nerfed to 25% just due to having two lives, and Masashige's attacks always using the entire bar as a bulky, slow-recovering character with an area-clear at the end of it. But 4 of them outside Oda all do play quite differently, enough to change things up if you get bored, and the first 3 I mentioned are absolutely easy to pick up for good scores.
[h3](+) Pros:[/h3]
[b](+) Top notch style.[/b] Just the combination of visuals and sfx of the slashes rarely gets old, as seen in the trailer. Practically, the exception of Hideyoshi, whenever you're "drawing" your move and pre-planning, time almost stops, slowing down to a real crawl, and when you're done, the game plays out you slashing a bunch of enemies while they stay frozen. I don't pay attention to it much after being 5 hours in, but it's definitely still satisfying when you reach a [i]really[/i] high, over-30 kill combo.
[b](+) Semi-predictable spawn system.[/b] I'm not saying the enemies will spawn the exact same way every time, but I think if you move the [i]exact same way[/i] every time, the enemies practically do too. This is especially most apparent with tengus and archers, since there's way fewer of them. I think the game basically has a rule of "never spawn these two types of enemies in player vision", and since the playfield is literally just one screen where you can only see everything if you stand in the dead center, it makes sense. I think the spawn system in general is timing-based, e.g. An archer will always spawn at around the ~15 second mark, for example. Relatively in the middle, vertically. Which side they spawn in just depends on where you're not looking!
[b](+) Challenging.[/b] It might seem you're OP on the surface, but there's a slight delay right after slashing around, that can get you killed. On top of that, if you're not Tomoe or Hideyoshi, you need to refill your bar before being able to attack again, so goodluck surviving til then!
[h3](-) Cons:[/h3]
[b](-) Tough gimmick: Enemies bounce off each other.[/b] So yeah remember the straw hats I mentioned? When you keep too many of them alive, and three of them are basically going in the same straight line, the frontmost one can suddenly cover double the distance it otherwise would. This is because enemies push each other, in a VERY drastic fashion. I think it was done this way intentionally to add difficulty to the game, but it is annoying, and I wished there was a difficulty toggle or something that can turn this off so that things become a bit more predictable even when baiting a horde around. Also applies to the Samurai Warlords, who do one long lunging dash instead.
[b](-) No time-based score leaderboards.[/b] You'd think they have one since everytime you play a "run", at the top you can see both "score" and "current duration of survival", but from what I've seen, there's none for time. Oh well, at least there's a player leaderboard that accounts for all your combined score across 5 characters. I still wish there's one that was character specific, too, but eh.
[b](-) Sometimes when you alt tab and your system cursor is showing, clicks seem to stop working properly.[/b] Not a huge issue, but slightly annoying.
[b](-) Slightly repetitive music.[/b] Arcade games I guess.
[b](-) Brutally simple[/b]. Again, I think it's fine as an arcade game, but I do wonder if there's room for potential for a bigger game here. What if sh*t didn't start tuned up to 11, and have 15 minutes of horde buildup like Vampire Survivors? Give us easy stuff first? What if we HAD a health system and we're not one-hit kill? Currently it feels like the game starts way too intense. Which is good for short dopamine hits, but I just think there's an unexplored potential and scope here. Might make for a good second game, maybe!
[h1]Regardless of its faults, it's fun and very cheap, and the unique combat twist is a great hook. Definitely worth the price![/h1]
