It is immediately clear from the first lessons that NGDEV’s most recent 2D shooter is designed to turn you become an elite gamer.
To be clear, Gunvein is a true bullet hell shooter in every way. It never lets up from the opening moments, delivering an intensity reminiscent of some of the hardest works in the genre. This is a game that was clearly influenced by prominent figures from Cave, such Ketsui and DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou; it’s one of those releases where the gunfire seldom stops between the opening scene and the boss form.
Nevertheless, Gunvein has a talent for bringing out the most in your performance. It’s also quite uplifting. It requires you to complete a tutorial covering the fundamentals of the genre before you can begin the main game proper. This tutorial covers topics like controlling targeted bullets, “cut-back re-stream dodging,” navigating between small and large bullet curtains, and the strategic theory that determines how close you can get to larger enemies. This is not the place to go over each of those techniques, but even if you’ve done this before and have a list of Cave 1CCs in front of you, the lesson serves as a great review. Additionally, Gunvein’s first few minutes will probably act as a suitable primer for those who aren’t as passionate about the genre but still want to experience playing the most tightly packed bullet hell at a competent level. This mindset reveals a lot of the genre’s smoke and mirrors and helps you get out of some really tight situations.
Otherwhere Gunvein seems to have complete trust in your potential to achieve and bristles with passionate counsel about handling difficulties. This is not to suggest that it is a toned-down shooting game—quite the opposite. But instead of sending less skilled players to a watered-down easy mode, it seems intent on turning all of us into masters.
It’s well worth taking a look at the basics before going any farther with the gaming mechanics within. Gunvein, a shooting game designed by boghog, a rising star at Mechanical Star Astra, and NGDEV, known for their modern shooters for systems like the Neo Geo, focuses on creating innovative games within the boundaries of the template set by Cave, Toaplan, Raizing, and numerous other studios that first mapped out what bullet hell could be.
Gunvein’s tone and visual style are equally influenced by this tradition; everything from the ship and bullet designs to the scene below takes a reference from those timeless works. Not that Gunvein is only a derivative, mind you. Although it may not be visually striking, it adds a modern twist to the classic bullet hell style, presenting it with a crisper, cleaner presentation than is typically seen in a medium where gritty pixel art is quite popular. Speaking of tone, the game’s energetic soundtrack establishes the mood and enhances the action, while the crisp, well-defined audio does a superb job of informing the player of crucial details as the action is happening. For example, do you need to know when your allotted maximum number of homing missiles has discovered a suitable target? You will be able to tell that with a clear sounding ping.
Regarding aesthetic appeal, the bullet patterns and other general level design components are always superb. As you play, the patterns will become more familiar, but there will always be enough variation to prevent you from becoming complacent or relying too much on memorization. This is made possible by the waves of ordnance that almost constantly fill the screen. They also perform a ton of captivating things that challenge you to be a flexible, quick-thinking pilot. The several opponent waves, set pieces, and bigger hostile groupings, on the other hand, are masterfully timed and positioned, adding a fury of play and tempo that is exhilarating to be overwhelmed by. The generally excellent boss fights, on the other hand, can border on becoming a war of attrition due to how slowly they progress.
You get five stages centered on a credit-based system, spread throughout a vertically scrolling trip that sees you darting above a future war-torn world, with Gunvein proudly honoring the genre’s arcade roots. A particularly aggressive shooting experience is offered by Gunvein, where screen domination—a fast-paced, high-risk strategy centered on rapid kills and presence throughout the play field—is the way to go. It’s an extremely satisfying thrill trip that may keep you feeling ecstatic for a while even after you put the game down.
Using the same fundamental weaponry as DoDonPachi and a plethora of other games, you receive a broad shot that dispatches smaller “popcorn” foes fast and a concentrated, potent laser that slows down your own ship’s speed while concentrating all of the force in front of it. There’s also a homing missile feature, which allows you to quickly track down your target by firing off bursts of targeted bullets at both foes and surrounding terrain.
Thus far, putting lock shot aside, that descriptor may apply to a good many other purebred bullet hell shooters. However, once more, rather than attempting to recreate the genre, excellent shooting game design frequently focuses on innovating within the limitations of the genre. And Gunvein is quite good at that.
Gunvein, who makes bombing one of the most effective strategies for scoring the most points, succeeds in creating a tight conceptual companionship between survival and scoring play. Bombs are mostly used to disrupt combination chains and eliminate possible score cash-ins in shooting games, which are primarily designed with survival in mind. Not so for Gunvein, though.
This is the basic way that the scoring operates. Rapid deaths fill a meter. A collected bomb fragment is dropped each time the meter reaches its maximum. When you gather enough bomb fragments, a bomb is produced. When a bomb is dropped, everything in its path, whether intentional or accidental, is transformed into a shower of massive gold stars that provide a massive amount of points. After then, obtaining more bomb fragments and resuming the core loop are required.
If you play with sufficient aggression, screen presence, and risk-taking, you may add enough pace to the loop to consistently score and bomb. It’s a system that makes you constantly moving, taking chances, and playing with aggression, which makes for an exhilarating and really satisfying shooting experience. However, compared to Ketsui and its kind, things are moving a little more slowly. Gunvein’s demand is strong and the number of bullets is much higher, yet after a comparatively short dedication period, it’s astonishing how doable navigating the garish swarm may be.
The game itself limits the number of participants on each online leaderboard to 10. To view all of your scores in the interim, go to the game’s leaderboard page on Steam. Though it may seem like a strange choice, the Gunvein crew has obviously chosen to honor the aspect of arcade culture that holds that the greatest have a claim to special acknowledgment. It offers an alluring opportunity to be mentioned within the game instead of outside of it.
In contrast, the three player ships offer a ton of potential variation in terms of play style and score system. Each has a unique ratio of lock-on range, speed, and firepower. More significantly, each offers a unique lock-on mechanism and a range of bomb behaviors, from a positional mine to an extremely powerful overpowering laser. This implies that there are a plethora of diverse play styles and scoring systems to investigate. There is a lesser difficulty option, but it’s by no means condescending, and the maximum difficulty level should challenge readers who are experienced with the genre.
In addition, there’s a practice mode and several’missions’ that include boss rush set-ups and short form caravan tasks. There’s even a very unique roguelike setup that does away with the careful architecture of the arcade mode, randomly introducing various elements, establishing a ship upgrading system that can be changed on the fly, and offering a plethora of customizable options. Do you want to take on Gunvein on a low difficulty level when enemies appear all over the place and you are unable to memorize the patterns? For those who aren’t as devoted to the shooters’ purity, Roguelike Arrange has you covered.
In the end, Gunvein becomes a fairly recognizable shape. You might want to explore elsewhere if you’re looking for something that truly reinvents its genre. But it delivers a genuinely excellent shooting game that is constantly thrilling, has incredible scoring depth to explore, and somehow enhances your own talent by gently changing norms to challenge players to try new techniques and strategies.
A lot of contemporary shooting games deviate from the genre pattern created by Cave. Among that large bunch, Gunvein is among the best.