Reign of Bullets

Fun side scroll shump. Nice customization of weapons, had me addicted for about 6 hours. Buy on sale.

To start I don't like this genre, and I don't really like this game. But I can't deny that it can be fun, and if you like shoot em up, bullet hell, space shooters, roguelikes yadayada, then you will probably like this too. It has a heavy focus on customizing your weapons. Each stage nets you new weapons and scrap to buy upgrades like more weapon slots and health. That's all well and good, and definitely makes the game more fun. But since customizing is such a huge part of the game, you'd think the menu to do so would be easier to use. At first, I didn't even realize I didn't have anything equipped. It's not self-explanatory and took me a minute to figure out what was going on. Then unequipping and equipping weapons feels like a chore for how much mouse movement you have to do and made me dread having to update my weapons. And speaking of mouse movement, don't use one. Try a controller. Moving the mouse moves your ship, and it doesn't respond well. If you move your mouse too fast, the ship kind of just loses track and stops moving. When you have to dodge thousands of bullets, pinpoint movements are essential, and that's just not present in this game, at least with my mouse. And moving fast enough to dodge big bosses jumping around? Not happening. It just doesn't feel good to play it, you know? So movement and customizing aren't great...the two most important things in this game... I fought two bosses, both are very boring. They take too long to start the fight, and then there's points where you're just waiting around for a chance to hit them. If you're not lazy, you can adjust your weapons to face up or down, so you can at least shoot them a bit when they're kind of off screen, but that's too much effort. And they take forever to kill. I played on the second lowest difficulty. The first 10 levels are a breeze, then after that each level got significantly harder, so that the game turned into a roguelike. Enemy spawns were different each time I tried a level, you keep all the items and money collected in a stage, and if you can't beat it, you just keep trying until you're upgraded enough to move to the next, rinse and repeat. So yeah....roguelike. I gave up on the second boss, because the controls weren't responsive enough to dodge him, and he is so boring. I didn't feel like sitting through 20 more levels on top of that and grinding away so much of my time on a game I got for free. But honestly, its not bad at all and I did have fun enough to say without question that fans of the genre will likely enjoy this.

Kind of like a clicker game... only thing is you hold down your mouse key and avoid them bullets. Level after level after level of enemies to shoot at. Collect money and parts. A chance to upgrade your aircraft in the hangar with lots of interesting weapons. Great idea and fun to play, but frankly the levels could have had more variation in the scenery.

Really like it, great shmup with loot system Note Finale : 15 / 20

Fun shmup, no bullet hell except on the final boss, though the screen can definitely get filled if you don't kill things quickly enough. The upgrade system is fun, but good drops are too rare. If you want to get fully equipped with good stuff, it would be very grindy. I played the last boss a whole bunch of times in a row on normal difficulty for ~40k cash, and a few items level 40-45 each time. It pays out well, but it's still a grind. It's hard to keep up the DPS with what it takes to kill stuff, especially on the TITAN stage with all the environmental hazards. The idea that you can outfit your ship with all kinds of different weapons and placements and orientations is cool, but I didn't use it all, for a laser focus on DPS, which seemed to be the most successful thing, because the enemies have so much HP. Rifle was my weapon of choice, but they seem to be a very rare drop.

Lots of hours in this. Lots of weapons and upgrades. And upgrades for weapons. Love schmup style games but most are arcade style causing a permadeath kind of play. This on has lots of diffuculty levels and all progress,weapons and upgrades are kept throughout the game. Next to SkyForce this is the most time ive put into a schmup to this day. Hoping for some DLC or a part 2 for sure. Definitely worth the $10 imo!

Everything I've ever wanted from a shoot-em-up. Upgrades, selectable difficulty that scales fairly, customizable weapon, and an eminently skippable story.