Vanguard Knights

Ikaruga by way of Star Fox. It's cool! Definitely needs another polish pass. I had difficulty telling when I was getting hit, and there are a LOT of spelling and grammar errors. The game has very weird controls, but they're *correct* - as in, they make sense, but they definitely take adjusting. The 3D arenas, I don't love, but the boss fights are all stellar. The Regalia is easily the highlight for me. PLEASE release the soundtrack, it rocks. Very happy with this!

There are things to like about this game, and the effort is admirable in such a neglected genre, but ultimately it isn't as good as star fox 64, which came out almost 30 years ago. Maybe it's not fair to compare a 1 man operation to the height of the genre from Nintendo, but if you're coming here to relive that experience, look elsewhere

Triggered some nostalgia on me I didn't even know I had. Pretty nice bullet hell game— the mechanics are pretty straight forward, some dialogues made me laugh a bit here and there, and the music was a blast. The game supports mixed gamepad and mouse inputs, so it plays really nicely on my Steam Controller too; that leads me to believe it shall also be a solid experience on the Steam Deck. This game is not particularly difficult, but I do believe it may prove challenging to some players who are not used to employing their peripheral vision a lot; big part of the difficulty curve of the game—specially with bossed—seem to rely a lot on splitting the player's attention between aiming and the color-shifting mechanics. Basically, you can switch your ship's color between red and blue with the press of a button. All enemies are also colored either blue or red, and so do their projectiles— if you get hit by a projectile of the same color as your ship, you absorb the impact; otherwise, you take damage. So far so good, but things start to get crazy as some bosses are capable of switching projectile colors themselves, spawn energy barriers with variety of patterns that you have go trough in the right color whiles not loosing attention to aiming and shooting, and big-d cruise ships with mixed color weaponry. Although it may look repetitive at first, the game does a pretty good job on throwing new challenges at you to give your progression through its plot proper variance. Controls feel responsive enough so nothing really feels unfair, an so far I haven't bumped across game-breaking bugs or glitches. Some scenarios in the game are pretty complex when you have the chance to stop to take a look. Of course, the visual direction will click much better with you if you also come from the era of early 3D games like the ones on the N64 and PS1. Now, on the flip side of the coin, some things I believe are weak points of the experience: the color palette of the game lacks some contrast, specially in regards of separating the enemies clearly from the background and all the other stuff happening on screen. Particularly on the free-flight segments of the game, you may find yourself loosely flying around trying to spot the enemies you haven't taken down just yet; there is a prompt on screen—presented in the form of red arrows around your ship—that helps with this a lot, yet you may still struggle to spot some enemies right in front of you. Something else that can improve is how the whole tutorial is presented, as all mechanics are explained trough in-game dialogues you can miss easily within all the action. In general, I think it is a really fun game. Its shortcomings are negligible when put in the context of the whole experience, in my opinion.

So far Id recommend it Good: - Humor - Design (in general) - Corridor sections (It has a few issues with the way the control works tho) Bad: - Music, well Audio in general (no audio queue when healing or taking dmg among other stuff), except for the Voice acting which goes from ok to really good (specially the conversations between the wingman and the his superior) - free flying stages, mostly because the camera goes brrrrrr and it is hard to chase enemies IMO It is a fun game, and the exp is better IF you have your own BGM and you get use to the camera control. The game play is basically Ikaruga but 3D, which is a good thing imo

The ambiguity of my actions never felt so good