Shoot to thrill, play to kill ”…
Or sang the evergreen AC / DC. Although they were not mentioned in videogames, we believe that the expression fits the game that we will examine in this review and belongs to the type of shoot ’em up. These Amiga 500 games and arcades were mediocre, then slowly slipped into oblivion and finally live a relative revival, with releases like Raiden V. Ginga Force coming from Japan's Qute Entertainment and originally released for the Xbox 360 in 2013, with the localized version for PS4 and Steam available a few months ago.
Ginga Force is a classic bullet hell / vertical shoot ’em up, with some notable variations that we believe will satisfy all fans of the genre. At first, the creators tried to give the game a central story, which we do not see very often. There are many dialogue lines and many speeches, not only before and after each level but also during the action. Unfortunately, only Japanese voice over and English subtitles are displayed in the upper left part of the screen, which means that it is impossible for him player to read them and play at the same time. So the only way to see the whole story is to save your progress in replay and watch it later. In any case, this is not a big deal: the protagonist belongs to the pilots - guardians of a planet whose economy is based on a rare mineral, Septonium.
When a mysterious organization starts hitting its production sites, we are called to face them and find out who and why is hiding behind these attacks. Simple things, with expected twists and mediocre characters, while the stock anime visual does not help at all. In short, the effort is respectable for the genre, but it would be good if there was an English dub so that we could listen to the dialogues while playing. The graphics of Ginga Force satisfied us a lot. Beautiful colors, beautiful and varied environments and large to huge sprites filled our screen. The speed of the boat and the scrolling of the screen is excellent, not faster than it should be but fast enough to give the feeling that we are running dizzyingly and to give the necessary illusion of action.
Very often the camera leaves the top down view smoothly and shows us what is happening next to or behind the boat, giving a cinematic aesthetic to the image. The explosions are impressive, while the enemy fire has a bright red border and can be easily distinguished from the background. And our weapons are also very beautiful and "poke" the player when he uses them. In general, despite the age of the title, the visual effect looks comfortably modern, fresh and we think there is no room for negative comments. Note that the game runs smoothly and we did not notice frame drops and other bugs despite the loss on the screen. As far as the sound is concerned, the effects are also appropriate, for the dub we said it, while from a musical point of view each track has its own electronic theme, in the majority of them well written and fascinating.
Let us now turn to the most important element of the genre, the gameplay. The Ginga Force includes 10 tracks, quite large in area and three levels of difficulty. But even in easy, the difficulty is really high, especially in the last levels. The way the game manages the difficulty is with the one ups, which appear when we destroy a sufficient number of opponents. They immediately give us an extra life, but at the same time they are saved and if we fail to finish the track, we will start again with extra lives.
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