Project Neon

I have the game also on android. The game is excellent. (Tribute at Cho Ren Sha ) The dev is very kind.

This one is all about giving you that arcade like experience, including the kind of hard difficulty that would happily eat through your coins back in the old days. Fortunately, only your personal satisfaction of accomplishing something will take the hit here, because there are unlimited continues once you lose all your lives. The story really isn’t important, and it deals with the usual problem that seems to sit at the center of so many games set in the near future: climate change has made Earth increasingly inhospitable. The only hope is a scientist who abandoned humanity because he knew what was coming and went to live on Mars. Now, your mission is to break through his shield and bring him back to Earth. The basics are very simple. You move your ship around and keep the trigger held down to blast away at enemies coming at you. The only other weapon is a beam that cuts through everything in front of you, including enemy bullets. The problem is that you only get one or two uses, which means you need to save it for when you really need it. And as it turns out, that is pretty much all the time. There are power ups as well, which come out of certain enemies. They appear on a rotating ring where you always have the same three options, and you pick one by flying through it. They can boost your beam, increase the power of your main weapon, or add diagonal fire to it. Each one can be selected several times to make it more useful, so there is at least a little bit of strategy involved in deciding what to upgrade, but the time window to grab it is small and sometimes impossible because of enemy bullets. You lose all upgrades when you die, which happens every ten seconds or less. This game doesn’t have difficulty settings, but the default one is apparently locked to insanity, extreme, or whatever other word you can think of for something that wants you dead immediately. The biggest problem is the combination of huge and fast enemy projectiles and your own enormous ship, which is pretty slow and makes dodging bullets feel almost impossible. You could call it a bullet hell experience, but at least most bullet hell games give you some kind of patterns that you can learn and dodge. Here, you are constantly being bombarded by a rain of projectiles that are fired directly at you, no matter where you are. The only exceptions are smaller enemies and bombs that explode in patterns, but that doesn’t really help because those patterns often close off the only viable path you have for avoiding the much bigger projectiles coming straight at you. It gets even worse during boss fights, where you can die every five seconds while dealing with all kinds of projectiles in different colors and shapes. There are five stages and five bosses, and at least the art and animations are pretty good. Bosses don’t exactly fall apart or have a specific weak point, so you can damage them from anywhere. Each boss does, however, have three phases, and taking away a chunk of its health changes its attack patterns. As far as I know, there are no extras or bonus content. The only option that really changes things is whether you want a linear mode, where the stages follow one after another, or a course mode, where you can choose which stage you want to play next. There is also a camera option, allowing you to play as a side scrolling horizontal shooter or a vertical shooter. I found the vertical view slightly easier, but you also lose two thirds of the screen and have to play on a small strip in the middle, so it comes with its own problems. So yeah, this is definitely aimed at the very hardcore masters of shoot em ups, and I’d genuinely love to see one of them beat a single stage without losing a single life. That cuts the audience down to a very small number, and the high price is definitely another obstacle that will stop most people from even trying it. It’s well made and the gameplay is certainly there, but for me, the difficulty goes way beyond challenging and into the territory of simply being exhausting. I can appreciate what it is trying to do, but I’d personally wait for a considerable discount before jumping into this particular arcade nightmare.