Hell Blasters

Fantastic vertical shmup with great scoring mechanics and challenging gameplay. The story mode is a great way of framing a training mode. The music is also excellent. The score attack mode is tons of fun too.

https://youtu.be/Q1yepENlrIY Adding a narrative cutscenes is a nice touch, but not enough to make up for the somewhat simplistic shoot-em-up gameplay.

This is a superb game and deserves a wide audience IMO. The deliberately 8bit graphic style fills me with nostalgia for my misspent youth but is combined with modern shmup bullet hell gameplay mechanics which cater to players of all levels and abilities. For a spot on , accurate review check out Shmupjunkies review on YT contained in his 2021 shooters vid.

I have owned and played a ridiculous amount of shmups over the years. This one keeps calling me back. Not sure why but it scratches some primordial itch. New arrange mode is the tits as well!

Just for the "Journalist" difficulty, the game is worth your money. But seriously, the game is very competent and fun. Also is begginer friendly, so if you wanna a good introduction on the shmup genre, give Hell Blasters a chance. But please, play the Arcade mode after playing the Story Mode, because the stages on Arcade are long (which was broke into little sections on the Story Mode)

I'd recommend anyone to play this cool shooter, especially if they have any type of mental issue.

My impressions video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uax5HajvH4g Hell Blasters is an all-original vertical shmup with NES era visuals and graphics. I put that out there first because you have to appreciate these styles to enjoy this game. As you can see from the screenshots, this leaves a lot of unused space on your screen if you're not running it on tate mode. Don't let that put you off though because this is a really impressive title for something made by such a small team. Hell Blasters offers a standard arcade mode, as well as a caravan score attack and a full story mode as well, all with two characters, online leaderboards and replays. This is a batch of features you often don't see in even much larger, more expensive titles in the genre. The actual narrative in the story mode is interesting, though it's fairly basic, as is often the case with shmups. It also serves as a long tutorial for many of this game's unique mechanics. Each character has a different set of weapons available. Rather than collecting different weapons as you go, Hell Blasters has you focus on strategizing with its smaller arsenal. You can fire your main weapon in wide and concentrated patterns, the latter doing more damage over a smaller area. You also have a secondary attack which has the benefit of clearing certain kinds of bullets that it touches. This will become vital for clearing more complex patterns in bigger battles. It's a different way to think about a shmup's weapon mechanics and one I actually quite like. You also don't have lives as they're traditionally thought of but a health bar that extends a pip when you hit certain score targets. So there are no respawning back in a level when you get hit. The variable difficulties also make the game accessible for new players or outright brutal for those who want that kind of challenge. The developers clearly set themselves a hard limit of making this game within traditional NES limitations. I like seeing developers who do this because they'll often so some neat and different things to make a deep game within those limits. Hell Blasters does that very well. The music is quite good, as are the level graphics. I think the cutscene graphics are pretty basic and I wish there was more options to have for your background when playing in standard orientation but for a competitive shmup enthusiast, these won't matter much, if at all. If you like shmups and aren't put off by the NES aesthetic, Hell Blasters is a hidden gem that shouldn't be missed. This is a really impressive accomplishment for such a small team and I hope they get to make more stuff like it.