CYGNI: All Guns Blazing

Great visuals but overly hard for no reason.

Shmup purists might not like it, but a modern graphical spectacle shooter is the star here, and it's fun. 8/10

[b]Rating:[/b] ★★★★ - Great [b]Time Played:[/b] 3 hours [b]Difficulty:[/b] Easy \ Normal [b]Gameplay:[/b] - The energy system inverts normal shmup instinct: pickups only bank as permanent upgrade currency when your shields are already full, so playing greedy-defensive actually starves your long-term progress. Optimal play is keeping weapons maxed and topping shields off kills, and the tutorial never tells you this. - "Dual-plane" air/ground combat keeps things interesting but you can only fire one plane at a time, so ground targets often become a secondary you ignore when under fire rather than a genuine second layer except for when they're firing up at you. - Rich-get-richer economy is the core flaw: skilled runs bank more upgrade points, strugglers bank fewer, so the curve widens the skill gap instead of easing you in. - Single life on Normal+ across 15-20 minute checkpointless stages means a handful of stray bullets at a boss erases the whole run. The shield buffer softens the classic one-hit death, but no continues keep it brutal. - Missiles double as a defensive smart-bomb and also a convert to shield, so using them well is about panic-clearing walls of enemies but also top up your health when you're running low. [b]Story\Dialogue:[/b] - The first cutscene carries a real Pixar pedigree (the studio is ex-Pixar and Hollywood VFX artists) but the other cutscenes are 2D motion and the actual narrative is inconsequential filler: female pilot, alien invasion, done. - Story is quarantined to pre/post-stage cutscenes and never touches the gameplay, which suits a shmup but it means zero stakes or attachment. I would love to see it more fleshed out in a sequel. [b]Graphics\Music:[/b] - The reason to buy. AAA-tier visuals almost unheard of in this genre, with detailed backdrops and screen-filling bosses that make most pixel-art shmups look ancient in comparison. - The flip side of the spectacle: debris, lasers and explosions get so dense you can genuinely lose track of your own ship, which hurts readability in a genre built on reading bullets. - The orchestral "John Williams at home" score is divisive. It's grand and cinematic but lacks the driving melodic hooks classic shmups lean on, so it can feel forgettable mid-fight. - Boss design is a standout: the whale-like craft and giant arachnid mechs are the moments you'll remember. [b]Before you Play:[/b] - Do the tutorial, but know it teaches buttons, not strategy. The real learning is dying and memorising enemy patterns, which repeat stage to stage. - Start on Easy. It grants three lives versus a single life on Normal, and even Easy is hard. No shame in it. If you die though, you'll lose all your upgrade points. - Farm stages 1-2 on Easy for upgrade points before touching Normal. You need to arrive souped-up or you'll bounce straight off the difficulty. - Keep your weapon energy bar maxed, not your shields. Pickups only bank as upgrades when shields are full, and full weapons unlock extra slots and fire patterns. Slide power back to shields with the bumper right before intense moments. - Ignore most ground enemies unless clearing them is forced (like the walker adds that regenerate a boss's shield). Splitting your focus across both planes is what gets you killed.

On papers, I'm the perfect audience for this game: I've played enough classics to know and understand the convention, and appreciate innovations and divergences from the norms, but not too attached to what the genre has always been to reject any deviance. This game promised to bring new things to the genre with budget, high-fidelity audiovisual, beginner-friendliness, and appeal to veterans. I think it succeeded only on the first two. I'm very annoyed, because Cygni half-arses everything it does: - It allows right stick aiming, but barely about 30 degrees on each sides. - The pleathora of energy point drop seems to encourage resource management and constant energy shifting to use every piece of resources available, but then every unused point of unused resources becomes the currency for upgrades. - The missiles aren't that powerful, which is fine. They could have been valuable tools in coverage to reach areas your guns can't reach, but then your guns have full customisation on the directions they can shoot, and whopping six sets of options available. - It has an upgrade system, but the entire thing is half-baked and poorly put together. - There is no significant or gameplay-altering upgrade. The most signicant improvement out of these is doubling my missile count and its AoE range. - The ray burst, costing whopping 400 energy points (which is about one third of what you get in a full playthrough), feels more like a side-grade, and borderline a downgrade from the default shot. - It's okay if the game wants to be grindy farming game, whereas player will gradual earn currencies to be more powerful overtime and overcome the levels. However, Cygni insists that the player git gud, and dying will completely erases any earned resource in the session. This is on top of some fundamental problems in game design: - Frontloading one of the more difficult bosses upfront straight into stage 1. - So much bullets from beyond the screen. - Artificial difficulty that is merely caused by exceedingly unevenly reduced droprate, which the player is entirely at the mercy of. - I'm not sure if the "normal" difficulty is supposed to be this hard. - Repetitive and lengthy sequences with little variety. Cygni had such much ammunition to succeed, then proceeded to miss most of them. In a pursuit to please everyone, it pleases no one.

I own Cygni because it was on a steep 90% discount and bundled with Gradius Origins, to the degree that it was just cheaper to get the bundle than buy Gradius by itself. It's pretty bad, but I guess can be fun in a kind of janky, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ way. Can't recommend. The biggest issue is that the core movement is pretty bad. Acceleration and inertia is the hallmark of the "euroshmup," but this feels pretty bad even by those standards, When using WASD or the DPad on a controller, your ship moves at a slow crawl for about one entire second before suddenly accelerating to insane speeds in nearly an instant. But when using the analogue stick, the slow phase of movement is reduced to only about a quarter-second before suddenly taking off to super-fast speeds. Why....? This leads to a lot of herky jerky movement as you try to weave your way through nigh-undodgeable waves of lasers. The core movement of the game feels like it's still in alpha or beta, in a game that was sold for thirty bucks. It's bizarre because the game actually has pretty complex mechanics, definitely makes you use all the little buttons on your controller for switching loadouts and adjusting shield vs firepower and subweapons. (These mechanics are extremely poorly explained even in the game's tutorial, expect to spend some time figuring out how the game works.) With more attention paid to the core design this could be a compelling game. But instead it just feels like they were just throwing ♥♥♥♥ at the wall. Stages go on for what feels like forever with repetitive waves. There's tons of bullet waves that are basically undodgeable (because your movement is really bad), which the game addresses by lazily littering the stage with shield powerups so you can keep taking hits and winning by attrition. Lazy Design 101. Already padded-out levels are made even longer by wave and boss introductions where the enemies will be invincible for a good 10-15 seconds. You're left with no choice but to just wait it out until you can actually start fighting the enemies, effectively watching an unskippable cutscene by another name. Seems like all the effort went into the UE5 presentation, and frankly it's not even that impressive. Some Pixar-looking cutscenes, cool explosions, gorgeously rendered but ultimately soulless phone-game-style stages, an "atmospheric" soundtrack. The high production values are this game's one merit, and yet I can't even really commend them for it anyways. Just causes the game to have really bad performance issues with no upside. The only reason to really own this game is because, again, it's cheaper to get the bundle so you can own the excellent Gradius Origins collection. The only reason to actually PLAY IT is because, after you've had your fill of the classics, you're curious enough to see what a BAD shooter is like. Cygni isn't without its janky charms, but it's really most useful as a crash course in bad shooter design. So go play Gradius instead.

[h1] ⚖️ MATCHING EXPECTATION:[/h1] * 🟢 = Available = Fun +1 * 🔴 = Not Available = Fun -1 * Match Nothing = 0 Fun 🟢 AAA Quality Visual Effects 🟢 Cinematic Presentation + Audio 🟢 Non-Stop Dodging Thousand of Bullets 🟢 Firepower & Shield Power Management 🟢 Shooting Direction Management 🔴 Optional Slow Motion Ability 🔴 Optional Mouse Control Movement 🔴 More Grindy More Powerful 🔴 Casual Difficulty [table] [tr] [th]fMeter[/th] [th]FUN[/th] [th]fUN METER[/th] [th]DISCOUNT[/th] [th]COMMUNITY[/th] [th]REVIEWER[/th] [/tr] [tr] [th]A+[/th] [td]5[/td] [td]Loving it [/td] [td]No Wait[/td] [td] -[/td] [td] -[/td] [/tr] [tr] [th]A[/th] [td]4[/td] [td]Liked it[/td] [td]No Wait[/td] [td] -[/td] [td] -[/td] [/tr] [tr] [th]B[/th] [td]2-3[/td] [td]Half satisfied[/td] [td]Wait 50%[/td] [td] ✔[/td] [td] ✔[/td] [/tr] [tr] [th]C[/th] [td] 1[/td] [td]Less interested[/td] [td]Wait 75%[/td] [td] -[/td] [td] -[/td] [/tr] [tr] [th]D[/th] [td] 0[/td] [td]Not what you need[/td] [td]Wait 100%[/td] [td] -[/td] [td] -[/td] [/tr] [/table] 🏅 Community Rating: [b] Mixed [/b] ⚖️ [b]fMeter {B}[/b] Worth a play, if you enjoy Rapidly Dodging Non-Stop for Thousand of Bullets. However, if you're looking for Casual way to play it, this genre is not for you 🔎 Check the full list for your preferred gameplay 👇 [u][i]https://steamcommunity.com/groups/expectationchecklist/discussions/1/573795381137223042/[/i][/u] [h1] 🕘 IMPRESSION:[/h1] * Year 2024: Game released & suprising got it free on Epic account * 1 hour later: Great game but feeling too stress to Master it * Year 2026: I missed this game, finding way to overcome the problem * 4 hours later: Finished the campaign but only locked "unwanted" game mode :( * 0 hour later: Start again on Steam account [h1] 🔊 TESTER MUST KNOW:[/h1] * It became free to claim on the Epic Games Store for one week (until 13 August 2024) * Saved Epic progression will carry over to Steam account = Share the same * 60 fps capped and not optimized performance * Upgrade points share with Player 2 no matter is exist or not * Arcade Mode = Limited pre-selected loadout before starting * Arcade Mode = No checkpoint save * Arcade Mode = Only 1 life for the entire run * Arcade Mode = Hi-Score will be uploaded for global leaderboard [h1] 💎 SAME GENRE COMPARISON:[/h1] * Swap energy between Shield and Fire Power gameplay * Optional Auto Fire / Aim * Optional adjust fire direction slightly left and right * Optional to attack ground enemies * Speedy gameplay * Non-stop dodging rapid bullets for 10+ min * Normal SHMUP game each mission last for 5-10min, but this is 15+ min * Optional insert Konami Code to unlock everything * No online coop * No leaderboard for campaign mission [h1] ⚠️ RUMOR CHECKING:[/h1] * The visual looks absolutely amazing ➜ Agree, especially the explosion effects * Too much visual clutter ➜ Agree, especially doubt that tiny bullet is require to dodge or not * Difficulty spikes ➜ Agree, when it was easy for a few stages, suddenly become super hard, but still we can tune down the game speed based on players liking * The energy mechanic isn't for everyone ➜ Gameplay often require constantly swaping energy between shield and weapon, feeling it interrupts the flow of dodging bullets * Story isn't memorable ➜ The cutscenes look expensive, but it doen't explain clearly, unless player study deep into the true story behind the cutscene. [quote] [b]Remember to 👍 for me if you liked this review:[/b] 🔔 More similar reviews ➜ [u][url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31940448-Expectation-Checklist/]Browse Here[/url][/u] and follow this Curator, or 🤝 Visit Our Gaming Discussion ➜ [u] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/expectationchecklist]We're Here[/url][/u] 📢 Disclaimer regarding Short Hours & English Errors ➜ [u][url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/expectationchecklist/discussions/0/4594180031254224809/]Read Here[/url][/u] [/quote]

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing é um shoot ’em up vertical moderno que combina ação intensa com visuais de alto impacto, efeitos especiais e trilha sonora cinematográfica, tentando elevar os clássicos do gênero a um patamar “next-gen” sem perder o feeling tradicional. O jogo aposta em fases longas e um sistema de gestão de energia entre armas e escudos, o que adiciona um elemento tático à pancadaria constante. Os gráficos impressionam e o design de chefes é marcante, mas isso nem sempre compensa problemas como repetição de padrões de inimigos e certa falta de identidade em relação aos ícones do gênero. A dificuldade é elevada — mesmo no modo “Easy” muitos sentirão o jogo punitivo — e a curva de aprendizado pode ser frustrante para iniciantes. A recepção crítica é mista: muitos elogiam a ambição e o combate, enquanto outros criticam a narrativa fraca e o valor geral frente ao preço pedido. No fim, CYGNI é um título interessante principalmente para fãs do gênero e jogadores que apreciam desafios intensos e estética audiovisual cheia de estilo. ....... \_☠_ ▄▂_ .........[█|||███████]▄▄▄▄▄▃▂ ..__▂▅█ Mafia do Retrogame █▅▄▃▂ I████████████████████████████] ...◥⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲⊙▲◤ MAFIA DO RETROGAME - YOUTUBE @mafiadoretrogame https://www.youtube.com/@mafiadoretrogame APRESENTANDO O GAME https://youtu.be/MshLgWwnZl8