Reseñas recientes de TheDarkPhantom

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

Criticizing a widely popular game is something that can cause trouble. You'll always get a bunch of that game's angry fans berating you for what you have said or try to show you how wrong you are by any means necessary.
But I don't care about that. Art is subjective; Which means it can be perceived in many different ways by anyone who views it. So nothing is going to stop me from saying that Prodeus is one of the most overrated boomer shooters I have ever played in my life, one that I desperately wished to wrap up sooner.

I can't deny that Prodeus leaves a damn good first impression in the first hour.
At first, this game is exactly what you expect from something that has Brutal Doom as one of its inspiration sources. Combat is very fast and thrilling. Shooting at an enemy causes them to start spraying tons of blood everywhere, which gets amplified if you hit them from point blank range or use a rapidfire weapon like the minigun. The game even has location-based damage to an extent, which means you can rip the enemies' heads and limbs off. All of the metal music tracks cause your adrenaline to pump. All of what I've mentioned so far is pretty entertaining to see.
But unfortunately, the game cannot keep this going and everything that initially makes it a treat to play becomes the bane of its existence later on.

Here's the thing: Prodeus is amazing in the first hour, but gets utterly tedious after that for a variety of reasons. The tediousness is so bad that I legitimately thought I was putting way more time in the game. I would feel like I had played for well over an hour, just for the Steam overlay to show me it was just 20 minutes.
The first cause of this is the visual style. While the game is phenomenal on the technical side, it visually looks exhausting. The mood of the whole game is dark and gloomy, and the choice of lifeless colors as the dominant color palette has caused the areas to look dull and depressing. Not only that, the environment types you go through are pretty limited, mostly consisting of caverns with orange/green lava in them or space stations. As the game very rarely tries to do something different in this regard until the very end, you will just see the same environments for multiple hours, eventually leading into visual boredom. Unfortunately, the game realizes this very late, with only the final set of levels featuring distinct visuals.
Then there's how the game handles encounters. In the beginning, Prodeus goes for controlled encounters. What I mean is that you go from room to room, find key cards, fight whatever enemy the game throws at you and have enough space to move around or take cover. But everything breaks apart when the game goes for battle arenas and keeps using them for the majority of the campaign. You constantly get dropped in big arenas with lots of ammo refills around and enemies rushing at you from all sides, with them spawning in multiple waves. Only it's at the end of the game when it goes back to its working formula in the first hour, which you will quickly realize is because of going through the same beginning levels, but backwards.
And finally, we have the limited enemy roster. Despite the number of enemy encounters in Prodeus, the enemy variety is very poor; So much so that the game has to re-use previous minibosses and introduce powered up versions of normal enemies in order to compensate for this issue. And despite this, it still utilizes these enemies en masse throughout the game, so this limitation is more easily noticeable.
Prodeus thinks just having a chaotic gameplay and going for sensory overload is fine and will keep players satisfied & interested, but the truth is far from that. It has forgotten that Brutal Doom was a mod attached to an already good game that just added these fancy stuff on top of a refined experience. Having one fight after another with no breathing room or meaningful exploration gets tiring, the limited types of enemies sets the course for stale fights and repeating tactics, and the barrage of visual effects... well... that requires its own section.

Unfortunately, the game has a horrendous case of bad visual clarity. I really struggle to see what's exactly in front of me due to a combination of the color palettes and the visual effects. First we have the enemies blending-in with the environment due to their pixelation and color palettes matching with the visual style and permanent visual effects of the game, especially when they are far away , making them hard to notice unless they are already attacking you so you can spot their bright projectiles.
Then we have everything else interfering with proper visibilty of the battlefield. The blood splatter effects are so excessive that cover other enemies and projectiles especially if you are using weapons like the minigun, the lights emitted from nexus points and enemies have a blurring effect to them that makes things incredibly hard to see , Prodeus enemy-types constantly shoot big blue projectiles that cover a large part of your view, explosions are very big and bright, getting hit by projectiles flashes your entire screen for a splitsecond and all of these are without mentioning some of your own weapons' projectiles getting in the way of visibility.
As I mentioned before, the enemy encounters are chaotic. You know, the exact type of encounter where you NEED TO be able to clearly see the screen in order to correctly respond to threats? So this horrid lack of visual clarity just makes for a lack of playingfield awareness, which then leads into pure frustration and unfair deaths. Not that death is a serious setback...

Unfortunately, there are other things about Prodeus that I have gripes with, starting with the deaths.
In Prodeus, enemies weirdly get alerted to your presence from far away or even behind doors, and prepare to attack you. In addition to all of the above, this makes for lots of frustration and possibly death, but death hardly feels like an obstacle. You can just respawn from the nearest checkpoint infinitely, which removes all tension. But considering the final stage and its lack of respawns, I think this was added to remedy the confusion caused by the utter visual chaos, and to prevent the game from getting frustrating.
Next, I'm going to join the reload criticizers. All of the weapons in Prodeus need to reload. If you run out of ammo on one weapon or switch to another mid-reload animation, you need to finish the reload process before firing it. This works in the beginning of the game, but do you seriously expect me to be careful of my location in a big arena with enemies of various sizes attacking me from every place and distance, with THAT visual clarity and manage the reloads as well?
Finally we have the way the game handles its dynamic music system. If it detects a group of enemies nearby or starts a scripted encounter, battle music starts to play. But unfortunately, it never knows exactly when to stop. Many times you will see that you are still in middle of combat and the game decides that things have calmed down and vice versa. This makes music an unreliable audio cue, because it can lie to you at any moment.


A disappointing boomer shooter. Prodeus' obsession with constant wide-scale battles without breathing rooms, coupled with a horrendous case of bad visual clarity, ultimately makes for tediousness.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

I'm always happy to see a new ASTRO PORT game. They are one of the few developers that still go for unique ideas no matter what, and everytime I play their games, I usually find something that I never expected. RANDOMAX continues this tradition and has great ideas, but has some shortcomings that have resulted in a game that can be fun, but most likely will not be appreciated by the masses.

I'm sorry everyone, devs included, but this is not a rogue-lite as claimed on its store page. RANDOMAX is a straightforward shmup with light randomization. There's no meta progression, no path selection, no currencies, no trading, et cetera. The randomization alone doesn't make a game a rogue-lite. But it does make for an interesting and replayable gameplay.
To start, RANDOMAX has an emphasis on taking risks and favors aggressive play. Upon defeating enemies, two items drop from them. The first one is heart items that charge your shield gauge. By filling this gauge up once, you get a shield that protect you from one hit. But if you charge it twice without getting hit, you will enter the time-limited "MAXIMUM" mode. In this mode, your score is multiplied and you need to keep collecting hearts to keep it going. This, in turn, fills up a second gauge called "Extend" that will grant you an extra life upon getting filled. And that is the only method of getting extra lives in the game.
The other collectible item comes in the form of gold emblems that charge the special attack gauge. Upon filling up, it will grant you a temporary power up out of six available ones. You might get a screen nuke, a magnet powerup, a boost to you ship's passive abilities or something else. And here's when things get interesting: You can collect these items like normal, but it won't give you much of a fighting chance as the optimal way to do this is take a risk and try collecting them en masse.
Throughout the game, you can see a visible blue line at the top of the playing field. If you move your ship above that line, all of the on-screen items will be drawn towards and collected by your ship. However, that's also one of the most dangerous places to be as a simple miscalculation can put you at the mercy of enemies and their firepower. You can opt not to using this mechanic, but then your shield will recharge slower and you won't get extra lives.

RANDOMAX stays true to its name and leaves a bunch of stuff to randomness. First, we got the randomized stage orders and then comes boss randomization. The game has 43 bosses and mini bosses, each of them being exclusive to a certain difficulty mode and which ones you get in a run is left to the RNG. This means the higher the difficulty, the more bosses you can have the chance to go up against and the final boss will be more difficult as a result. And at last, there's weapon randomization.
Every main character in this game pilots a ship with different attributes (speed, defense, etc.) and a pre-selected set of three basic weapons, each bound to a specific button on the controller. By entering the shop building in each of the stages, you will get a randomized choice of weapons or powerups to equip or discard. Your new weapons will be stacked on top of your already existing ones, and you can use them until they run out of ammo.
Yes, ammo is finite in RANDOMAX. While your basic weapons have lots of ammo to prevent unwinnable situations, the extra weapons do not have such advantage. When you run out of ammo for a weapon, the game will visually notify you and then switch you to the previous weapon in that stack, making proper planning and good use of them very important. All of these are legitimately amazing ideas to implement in a shmup. Except...

I'll be honest with you, I really don't feel like all these systems are adding much to the game. As in... their implementation is lacking.
You go through the same stages with the same enemy formations facing you. You have all these special weapons, yet many of them function the same and those that do area of effect damage are clearly superior compared to the others as without them, you don't have much chances against hordes of enemies. You have all these powerups and never get to see them in their full-powered glory because the game is not long. You have all these features and yet the game feels... normal; Like you're just playing another regular shmup. I guess what I'm saying is... It doesn't feel like the randomization is a big part of the game. It also doesn't help the the difficulty is mostly on the easier side.
RANDOMAX is much easier compared to other shmups. In my first attempt, I went through the whole thing on Insane difficulty and nearly 1CC'd it, only using a continue on the final bossfight. All of the difficulties are like this with the exception of Ultra and Maximum, barely challenging your skills. And when it does try to challenge your skills, a very big problem shows its head...

Majority of your deaths in RANDOMAX come not directly from enemy attacks, but from the sheer visual chaos that happens on screen at times. The playing field is small, yet the game still fills it up with massive bosses (leaving you little room to move around) or covers it with a variety of visual effects. There are yours and enemies' projectiles in various sizes and colors, lots of explosions followed by screen shakes, and enemies arriving and shooting at you from all directions, eventually causing a very severe case of screen unreadability. To add to the problem, some of the enemies have special behaviors such as releasing a bullet on death or homing in towards you, which makes tracking them difficult among all the clutter.
I have legitimately lost count of how many times I have lost a shield/life without even knowing what the hell hit me. Everytime I play this game and start having fun, this one issue causes me to get infuriated. And if it wasn't for this issue alone, I would have already beaten the Maximum difficulty or 1CC'd all my attempts by now.


All of this makes me feel conflicted. There's real effort put into the game. I really like what it offers and I had decent fun with it, but seeing all of these issues is quite painful. If the ideas were explored to their fullest and the game did not have a severe case of visual unreadability, we could have had something amazing on our hands. But as it is now, RANDOMAX is a game that the fans of this developer will most likely enjoy playing if they can ignore the visibility issues, and the rest will look at it as just another mediocre shmup.


The game can be fun & has great ideas, but their implementation seems lacking, feeling like they don't have much effect on the gameplay. The severe visual unreadability also drags down the experience.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

I hate gacha games. No matter how good they are, their always-online nature means that one day, the game you have spent so much time on will go offline and your collection of various stuff is going to join the sands of time. Some, like myself, would play these games if their devs ever promised an offline version down the road. But such thing had never happened... until Capcom surprised everyone by announcing an offline version of Mega Man X DiVE (MMXD for short).
This is a massive victory when it comes to game preservation and sets an example for other gacha developers. But while their decision to do this should be praised, it does not mean we should refrain from talking about the quality of the final product.

If you want to experience a decent story and narration in MMXD, I suggest not bothering. The game begins with you, a die-hard Mega Man fan being sucked into their monitor while playing MMX1 and entering the deep log: A hub where all of Mega Man series' history and memories are kept. Something is corrupting the data here (you know EXACTLY what it is) and it's up to you to team up with new faces and correct the irregularities in time.
The writing's quality keeps fluctuating between bad and nothing special, with the dialogues constantly interrupting gameplay in true MMX fashion; Something that even one of the characters jokes about. The game even introduces new characters right at the end with no prior development. But truth be told, the story does have good stuff in it. Some events like meeting with a pre-infection Sigma are a nice change of pace, the meta jokes are good and the writing gets way better at the climax of the story.

MMXD doesn't use the series' traditional gameplay and instead offers a mix of hack & slash and run'n gun, depending on what kind of weapon you are using. Melee weapons behave as you expect them to, but projectile-based weapons automatically lock on the nearest visible enemy. And the weapons have limited ammo now. You either need to stop shooting by waiting a while or switch to your secondary weapon to finish the reloading process.
There's also a power level system added to the mix. Each of the activities in MMXD require you to reach a specific power level, otherwise you would be outgunned if you attempt them. To raise your power level, you can buy/unlock a variety of equipment and then upgrade them with level completion rewards. At first, this does not seem to be any problem. But eventually the power requirements are going to raise faster than the beginning of the game, forcing you to grind a bit for EXP and resources.
Now is this a bad thing? Not in my opinion. The game is fun and is built around using those mechanics. But I'd say the experience starts to lose steam after a while. The gameplay and the objective system heavily encourage you to go as fast as possible and the exploration/replay value is very low. Furthermore, all of stages have mediocre level designs until the latter half of the game when things start getting interesting. Thus, DiVE is a game best played in short bursts and long play sessions can burn you out pretty fast due to repetition.

Gacha games usually have a large number of characters, with lots of them playing identical to each other for the most part. Among them might be the same characters you have seen before, just with new designs that honestly could have been skins. This ultimately renders many characters useless as those with powerful skills are beneficial for progression. MMXD also does exactly that.
MMXD features over 120 characters to play as, the majority of them being variations of existing characters with different designs and skills. Some of this game's character designs are actually great, an example being the Vergil Zero design which is sadly removed from this version. And on the other side of the spectrum, we have a load of fanservice-y costumes with unexpected jiggle physics added to them. I thought all of the reploids were completely metallic?
Having all these characters and designs is fine, but why choose someone like X or Sigma when Black Zero, Ferham and Cinnamon are all very powerful and can get you to the end without painful grinding? Some of the characters in MMXD are much better compared to all of the others. So if you use your favorites, the game gets much harder and if you go for powerful ones, it will get bearable yet boring. This is one gacha problem that Capcom has not been able to solve.

Speaking of which, how well does the game perform when it comes to removing predatory gacha systems anyway?
Capcom needed to do much work to convert the original game to a single player experience by removing the gacha mechanics. They have succeeded in doing so, but some of the changes are good and some of them are really bad. Here are the good ones:

• All rewards are significantly increased to compensate for the original grindy nature.
  
• All excessive currencies are removed, leaving only 2.
  
• Story seamlessly goes forward, instead of forcing you to redo previous levels on higher difficulty.
  
• Armor parts' qualities are no longer random.
  
• All of the events can be switched on/off at will. Some trigger automatically based on your system's clock.

And now we get to the bad ones:

• All useful online functionalities like story mode's co-op feature and race mode's leaderboards are removed.
  
• Events are locked until you reach level 60 and after that, all of them require 300K power to be fairly challenging.
  
• Challenge difficulty no longer gives rewards in story mode and events. You just collect stars to open prize boxes (story mode) or unlock achievements that give you element metals (events).
  
• Race mode also no longer gives any rewards, only offering you element metals by unlocking in-game achievements. Thus, it's now worthless.
  
• All of the collaboration costumes and events are removed, despite the majority of them being with Capcom's own IPs, requiring mods to bring them back.

I might have praised Capcom so far, but this game also has problems that makes me believe the higher-ups weren't sure about the game's success anyway and wanted to save as much resources as possible.
3D models look really well-done for a gacha (except Bass who looks goofy AF) and are incredibly faithful to original designs . But 2D character arts look downright horrible in higher resolutions due to severe quality degradation; Which is a shame because the art is really good.
Then we have the UI navigation. Instead of reworking the UI, Capcom has decided to use the easy way out and just have the controller/keyboard directional buttons move the mouse cursor around, which has made UI navigation a complete pain in the ass. So, on devices like Steam Deck that use no mouse, you constantly have to resort to the touch screen.
Lastly, there's the questionable performance. The game tends to stutter at times for no understandable reason with the culprit allegedly being a memory leak. And apparently it's prone to crashing as well, even though I have not personally encountered a crash in 17 hours of playtime. So be vary of them as well.


Proof that gachas can be turned into single player games. It's not devoid of problems, but will be entertaining as long as you do look at it as its own thing and not a traditional Mega Man game.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

LAST TIME ON BULLET SOUL...
A promising, new shmup game enters the foray. It shows great potential, ready to prove itself as one of the greatest among its peers. But when it comes to its actual performance, it cannot do as well as everyone had hoped. The game vanishes and then returns with a brand-new form after 3 whole years, promising that it will be better than before this time around.
Will the game be able to fix its shortcomings, being remembered for ages as a mighty shmup?

I honestly, truly cannot believe this is what the developers came up with after 3 years of the original game being out on the market. I did not expect them to go out of their way and remake the game from scratch, but also did not expect to see them changing the gameplay in a way that hurts the overall experience even more, with the additional content being something that doesn't warrant a new release and could have been added as DLC.
If you have not read my review on the original game, I recommend you to do so before continuing as the core of the gameplay has not changed and a lot of my points still stand. What you get in Bullet Soul: Infinite Burst's normal modes is almost everything that was already in Bullet Soul, with gameplay's shortcomings and clarity & difficulty issues staying intact. Even the launch issues were the exact same. There are a bunch of changes that are welcome, but unfortunately they bear no effect on the gameplay.
To name a few of those good changes: Enemies who were exclusive to the original game's caravan mode now appear in this version's normal modes, which differentates the experience to a small degree if you have already played the original. Score calculation at the end of a stage can now be sped up. Main bosses now get a visual alert before facing them and also have a visible countdown timer. The brief invincibility frames on some of the bosses have also been seemingly removed. And finally... the new music tracks are really, REALLY good.

Seems like the developers saw all the criticism about the game's difficulty and decided to tweak it, but the way they have done so is incredibly mixed at best and really bad at worst.
I'm saddened to say that the developers' solution for the original game's easy and dull gameplay is enemy and bullet spam. They have tried to raise this version's difficulty and challenge by increasing the number of enemies appearing on the screen, increasing the enemy projectile speeds, adding brand-new dense bullet patterns to the mix and also introducing enemies that only remain on the screen for a very short time so you won't have much time to shoot them down.
And they have done this in an uneven and uncurated manner imho. If the original was very easy in the main stages and got hard when you got to the bosses, Infinite Burst's difficulty curve starts fluctuating in middle of the main stages. One moment you are moving down enemies with literally no effort, and then all of a sudden you will see the screen filled to the brim with enemies and bullets. And in some cases, like the bossfights, the bullet patterns seem nearly undodgeable at times. These all feel like desperate attempts to make sure you always have something to dodge and hope it fixes the dullness. Which it doesn't.
This enemy/bullet overuse also makes the screen readability situation even more dire as now there are way more things on the screen that can blend with each other. And to make matters worse, some enemies can now enter the playing field from literally behind you, in addition to the sides of the screen. In fact, many enemies now arrive and shoot from the lower parts of the screen even from the early levels, greatly increasing the chance of getting hit by something you didn't see coming.

Infinite Burst also adds entirely new things to the mix. One of these additions is the brand-new Burst Mode, where Bullet Soul turns into Crimzon Clover. A bootleg version of Crimzon Clover, to be precise.
This mode ditches bombs in favor of the new burst ability. By defeating enemies, coins will drop from the enemies for scoring purposes and also a gauge at the side of the screen will gradually fill up. When the gauge is full, you can press the bomb button to trigger a time-limited burst mode, resulting in a massive power increase and all of the newly dropped coins turning into a variation with higher score value and the power to extend the burst time. You can keep the burst mode going by constantly collecting coins, or end it prematurely by pressing the button again and unleashing a bomb.
Now this seems fun when you read it in the text format. When you play this mode, you realize pretty quickly that it's not really much different from the main game anyway; It's the same thing with all issues and boredom intact. And it also has issues of its own. The burst gauge fills up too slowly for it to make an impactful difference, and its rainbow colored primary shot just worsens the visual readability issue. THe enemy and bullet patterns are still uninspired. While the game switches your health with a rechargable shield in this mode, the shield pickups refill a laughably small amount of it. The characters will utter a voice line upon picking up any coin during burst mode, which really gets on your nerves after a while.
The only positive change this mode has and I am utterly baffled on why it has not also applied to the other modes, is the fact that bullets actually disappear after an enemy's death. No, they don't turn white and stay on the screen; They cease to exist. The devs removed this unnecessary visual element in one mode instead of removing it from the whole game and I have no idea why.

The next addition to Infinite Burst is... UNLOCKABLES! By fulfilling certain requirements, you can unlock a number of artworks and also a hidden game mode called "Musou Mode". It's exciting to see they actually added something like this, right?
What if I told you they are all worthless letdowns?
There are only 4 artworks in the whole game, each showing up on the screen after beating the campaign mode with any character. And to unlock Musou Mode, you have to beat the campaign with each of the 4 characters. In other words, you have to play through the same, boring game 4 times for a game mode which is literally Burst Mode with unlimited burst gauge! Your reward for going through a boring experience multiple times is a game mode that is even more boring because it literally has no challenge in it! Can that really be considered a reward?

Tries to enhance the experience of the original game utilizing new changes and features, but still cannot be better than the dull game it once was. There are way better shmup games to play out there.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

Bullet Soul is one of those games that if it runs, you are an incredibly lucky person; Because if it doesn't, only god knows how many solutions you have to try before either giving up and refunding the game or finally succeeding. Never in my life I had to go above and beyond to fix the launch issues of a video game. Everytime I thought I had fixed this game, another issue took its place. Only by pure chance I was able to finally get this game to run normally...
And I went through all that FOR WHAT?!!!!

Bullet Soul's gameplay has an emphasis on playing aggressively, destroying hordes of enemies with high firepower. It constantly encourages you to kill enemies as fast as possible, rewarding you with tons of points in doing so. The ships you control are also pretty fast to move around, allowing you to cover the whole screen with your attacks with ease. And complimenting the gameplay is a very well-composed & catchy soundtrack. This should have been an instant recipe for greatness, yet what we have here is one of the dullest and most flawed shmups on the market.
The main reason for this claim is nothing but flawed implementation of one of the gameplay mechanics: The ability to cancel an enemy's bullets by killing them. Everytime you kill an enemy, all of the bullets they fired at you will turn white, deal no damage on impact and have no significance whatsoever. This applies to every single enemy and boss phase, and every single type of player attack (which includes the normal shot) triggers it regardless of when you kill the enemy. This basically causes the difficulty curve to be all over the place, as enemy and bullet patterns are simply not designed to leverage this mechanic.
The game constantly showers you with powerup items, also letting you easily collect them even after losing a life while additionally restocking your bomb supply. Combined with how fast the playable ships are, how large your attack range is and what little health most of the enemies have, you can drop hordes of enemies like flies with little (and sometimes zero) effort. This makes regular levels extremely easy to the point you won't even feel any threat from enemies (you can literally stay in place for prolonged periods of time and not get hit once!), resulting in you geting bored and losing focus, paving the way for random deaths that you were not expecting. On the other hand, boss fights can suddenly enter bullet hell territory with bullet patterns that are really dense and hard to avoid, not really built around how fast the ships move around.

Unfortunately, the game also has other issues that pave the way for an even less entertaining experience, with nearly all of them being reoccurring problems in this genre.
In the first place we have our old friend coming back for another round: Bad screen readability. Visual clarity is horrendous, with enemies and their colorful projectiles frequently blending-in with the backgrounds and also the playable ships' very flashy and bright primary attacks that cover the whole playing field. Then we have the insane clutter with your attacks, enemy attacks, enemies themselves and canceled bullets being thrown around, effectively hiding each other. And this makes for a very bad time; Especially if we take contact damage into account.
Contact damage is not something alien to shmups, but how the dev implements it can make or break a game. In Bullet Soul, contact damage causes an instant life loss, regardless of whether the instant bomb option is toggled on or not. This is not a problem on its own, but everything changes when you realize enemies can come out from the sides of the screen with zero prior warning, even near the bottom parts where your ship mostly resides in. Couple that with the game's lack of visual clarity and insane visual clutter to see how you can easily get hit by enemies that you didn't even see coming.
And Finally, we have the hitpoint of your ship not being clearly visible. Many other shmups specify a location on your ship to look out for (e.g. the cockpit) or allow you to hide/unhide the hitpoint location. Basically, they give you a clear visual indication of where you should not get hit. But in Bullet Soul, not only you have no idea where the hitpoint is, but also cannot keep track of it in middle of chaotic scenes.

The final nail in the coffin is the fact that you will see everything the game has to offer in one or two gameplay attempts as all of the available game modes feel the same and offer nothing unique and of their own. There are no difficulty settings, no unlockables, no modifiers and not even alternative endings to encourage replaying the game. Don't believe me? The ending videos are right there in the game's installation directory. Go and watch them to see that the only different thing between each character's ending is a single line of dialogue with no subtitles. Oh, and there's also barely any difference between the 1CC and normal endings; You'll either see the true final boss blowing up at the start of the video, or don't. The rest is literally the same.
So... I don't see myself ever getting the desire to replay this game. The gameplay is unsatisfying and very boring, there's nothing to spice up my playthroughs with, the leaderboards are dominated by Japanese shmup gods so one cannot even try to compete with others, and the game feels unrewarding as a whole. If the game isn't fun, why should I bother?
And don't bring my playtime into this. I spent 75% of it farming for trading cards.


Frankly, I believe no one should buy this game. And the reason for this opinion is not only because you can get way better and way more fun shmup games with more content for around the same price, but there's also an enhanced version of Bullet Soul out there, originally released 3 years after the version we have here.
This enhanced version, named "Bullet Soul: Infinite Burst", allegedly takes the original and builds upon it by reworking enemy patterns and adding new game modes. So by buying this version of the game, you only get access to an inferior product. But the question is, is this enhanced version actually better than the original? Is it worth it?

Well...

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

Listen, this is Senran Kagura. The primary reason that makes one interested in this franchise is the appreciation for its infamous levels of fanservice. And that includes you, dear reader. Yes, YOU! Don't deny it; You would not have tried to read this review if you were not even slightly interested. But as all know, that is not everything that makes a game.
Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit tries to mix the series' famous fanservice with a rhythm-based gameplay. It does the fanservice part justice and delivers good stuff in spades. But when it comes to actually offering a good gameplay, it fails miserably. Let's go through the details, shall we?

This series has always been about the fanservice (and will be) and you have to start asking questions if you play one of these games and see it doesn't feature any kind of it.
Unsurprisingly, Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit's focus ultimately leans towards the fanservice and the game does it very well. Some of the characters are dressed in revealing clothes, the whole game has you stripping other characters bit by bit as you try to win, the jiggle physics are outrageous, the perfect victory scenes are unhinged and if you are in desperate need of some fresh grass, the dressing room feature allows you to play dress up with the clothing that you have unlocked by beating the levels, see character models up close and even perform "various actions" on them.
And this fanservice has leaked into the story mode of the game as well, with very entertaining results. Depending on the character you choose for the story mode, the events and endings would either be weird, or filled to the brim with various jokes. My favorite is Asuka's storyline, where the game constantly throws girth related jokes at you. So if you really like this part of the series, you're not going to be disappointed. The gameplay however...

Here's the thing: Just like Gal★Gun: Double Peace, a game I previously reviewed, having an entertaining story mode and good fanservice is not going to single handedly carry your game. Many players will simply not go through hours of staleness for a couple minutes of hilarity, as is evident from the low completion rates of this game's achievements.
Unfortunately, the game stumbles when it comes to anything that is not fanservice, offering an experience that gets utterly repetitive and boring within an hour or two. Taking the strong fanservice depictions aside, the game does not have much left to boast with its audiovisual presentation. Whatever background activity you see from the characters in the first match is what you're going to repeatedly see until the very end. The final judgment cutscenes (featuring Hanzo) are not entertaining, despite their very silly premise. Except for a few vocal music tracks, all of the other compositions are neither catchy nor memorable and usually feel completely out of place and out of character.
And then we have the gameplay which feels either boring AF or unnecessarily hard.

Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit is just another one of your usual rhythm games with some competitiveness seasoning. You have two lines at the bottom of the screen where patterns appear on, and you have to press or hold buttons (as instructed by the game itself) when they reach a specific area. Do this well, and you will fill up a bar at the top of the screen. Your goal is to keep your fill percentage over %50 to win a match. Seems simple enough, but the game has actually managed to make it feel bad; Starting with the input system.
In most rhythm games, the number of inputs are usually restricted to a minimum, with the difficulty coming from the complexity of the patterns. You have a small number of input methods needed to perform commands, with each of them usually getting color coded for better visibility. For example, Yakuza 0's karaoke minigame only utilizes the face buttons on a controller (e.g. ABXY buttons on an Xbox controller). Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit on the other hand, doubles the number of buttons needed to perform commands and keeps the rest intact.
This game requires you to use both the face buttons and the directional buttons (WASD and directional buttons on keyboard) at the same time, while they have similar color codes. For example, both the X and left directional buttons are signified with the blue color. This has increased the chance of the player getting utterly confused at many points in the game and especially in more chaotic moments, thus missing some inputs or mistakenly inputting something else. And the situation gets even worse when we take the difficulty into account.

Unfortunately, Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit's difficulty is not well-adjusted. And this is because the game mainly decides how hard your experience should be based on the music that is playing, with energetic/vocal tracks having faster and more complex patterns. This happens regardless of the chosen difficulty setting. So for example, if you decide to play on the easy mode and then run into one of those energetic tracks, the game will not respect your choice and increases the challenge anyway. And if you play the game on hard and run into a chiller track, the difficulty decreases despite your preferences.
Because of this, you can see lots of difficulty spikes throughout the game and some of the battles are either much easier or much harder than the ones that came before them. The worst offenders are the battles against Daidoji and especially Rin, where the difficulty takes a gigantic hike regardless of the chosen setting. At this point, even the slightest mistakes leave you with almost no chance to recover and win, as missing a note takes out a rather big chunk of the top bar. If you're on easy mode, you're gonna have a bad time and any higher difficulty is going to make you cry during those battles.

And what you have read about so far is what that you're going to get for the entirety of the game as in terms of content, nothing has been changed or added to this version compared to the original PS Vita release (which this port is directly based on), except for a few graphics settings.
Aside from story mode, you only have access to arcade and freeplay modes which are the exact same thing. The only difference is that the former has no story and the latter acts as a practice mode, so both are practically worthless. The playable characters also don't change anything gameplay-wise. So you will be doing the exact same gameplay style but with different dialogues, every time you decide to do a story route.
This game could have really used some new stuff while transitioning from handheld to main platforms. For example, there could have been a local multiplayer mode to utilize the bigger displays of non-handheld platforms. But supposedly, the costs and time needed to add new things to the game were not deemed beneficial and such thing has not happened. This Ultimately leaves us with a game that you play once, and you have seen everything it has to offer.


Delivers in spades when it comes to the fanservice, but offers one of the blandest gameplay experiences marred with extremely inconsistent difficulty scaling, making it utterly repetitive and not fun.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

You know, certain things never go together, no matter how hard you try. You cannot mix water and oil, you cannot put herbivores and carnivores in one pen with no consequences, and you sure as hell cannot add time limits to a puzzle game that requires thinking and expect it to be fun.
PictoQuest is a game that tries to offer an innovation in the puzzle genre. But the end result is something that every negative review on its store page is right about: It doesn't work. This game turns the simple, relaxing premise of nonograms into something stressful and not fun by adding unnecessary challenges and punishments.

As advertised on the game's store page, the dev claims that PictoQuest uses light RPG elements in its game design but... it really doesn't use any RPG elements in my honest opinion. PictoQuest just has an inventory system, an in-game economy which allows you to buy and sell consumables, optional levels... and that's it. Those are stuff that you even see in other genres. If you were expecting a character progression system and/or inclusion of skills like the Puzzle Quest series, well I'm sorry, there's no such thing here. Don't expect a plot either. This is no Murder By Numbers.
And what we have is not satisfactory either. The optional levels reuse normal grids that you have solved before, and just ask you to do specific things while solving them such as not making a mistake or racing against a time limit. The consumable spells are mostly not worth it as their effects only last a very short time and also don't help much on very big grids. Then we have the HP system which, frankly, has damaged the game rather than adding to it. To explain this last point in full, we need to get into the combat system.

Truth be told, I don't think it's a good idea to add combat to a lot of puzzle games out there; especially if it's real-time combat instead of turn-based. And the way PictoQuest's combat system is designed just solidifies my opinion on this matter.
Most of the game's levels put you against up to 3 enemies or a boss. You have to choose which enemy to target utilizing the enemy display in the top right corner of the screen, then successfully clear a horizontal or vertical row of the grid to attack and deal damage. If you make a mistake, then the enemy gets to attack and can either take some of your HP away or miss their chance. Seems simple enough on the first glance, but then we have the details.
First, you have only 3 HP points when you start the game and normal enemies & bosses each deal 0.5 and 1 points of damage respectively, meaning you can only take damage for 3-6 times depending on the enemy type. This basically renders guesswork useless. You can buy potions to refill HP mid-game or get health upgrades, but the former can run out pretty fast (thus requiring more purchases) and the latter is fairly expensive. Considering the coin drop rate not being very high, these may force you to grind previous levels. Then there's the issue of time limits, as each enemy has an ATK indicator which signifies the amount of time you have left before they attack anyway regardless of your mistakes, and you have to delay them by doing your own attacks. This time limit creates major issues.

I'll be honest with you, I firmly believe time limits do not belong in this kind of puzzles. Stuff like nonograms or sudoku grids require adequate thinking and proper planning on their own. You need to take your time, relax and carefully think about your inputs. Introducing a time limit and threatening the player of losing the game because of it just unnecessarily increases the tension and also the chances of making a mistake. And the situation gets even worse in the multi-enemy encounters, because then you will have up to three different countdown timers to manage on top of solving the puzzle. And don't forget that in order to fight the enemies and delay their attacks, you have to finish an entire horizontal or vertical row to deal damage to them. Also do remember that guesswork is not worth it as it is incredibly risky.
You need to finish the nonogram puzzle in front of you as fast as possible because the enemies are going to attack you if you don't, then you need to keep an eye on the enemy display to switch between multiple enemies and delay their attacks separately and finally, you also need to refrain from doing potential mistakes while doing the former tasks. Fail to do these and you will be punished with HP reductions, eventually leading into a game over if you are not careful. And the game resets the field on a game over, so you have to do everything from the beginning and might also need to restock your inventory.
This is simply too much, especially for the newcomers to the genre who would want to start with this game; Which I think is fair to assume considering the visual style of the game being family friendly. And if we couple it with the game's rather quick pace of introducing bigger grids, it's not going to offer a pleasant exprience. Sure, there's a chance for the enemies to miss, but it doesn't happen often and you are on your own. Then we have the chest missions that do not have a time limit but take away an increasing portion of your accumulated money on each mistake, basically making the need for grinding more of a reality.

But, let's say one can ignore all of the points I yapped about until now. Will they be able to enjoy the puzzles themselves? The answer to that is a definite no. The game gets boring before you even hit the halfway mark because of frequest repeating patterns in the puzzles (mirrored placements as an example) and the stale audiovisual presentation.


Takes the simple and relaxing nature of nonograms and turns it into a tense, stressful and not fun experience by forcing you to never make mistakes and do everything under a time limit. Just skip it.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

You know you're in for a ride when a game has a dedicated "mom walked in" button.
Gal★Gun: Double Peace is indeed, a helluva ride. It's filled with ridiculously hilarious events and some very well-done writing that can immediately turn it into one of your favorite games in those regards. But on the other hand, the gameplay fails miserably at keeping you interested in the long run.

Gal★Gun: Double Peace is an on-rails shooter mixed with a visual novel. You go from arena to arena, use your preferred input method to aim and shoot at the "opponents" that pop up on the screen in true on-rails shooter fashion. Then you have visual novel sections in-between the shooting galleries with occasional multiple choice scenarios to tell the story.
What makes this game different compared to its peers is the fact that it's filled to the brim with anime BS of the horny/ecchi kind, mixed with a bit of slice of life. You have the over the top "accidents", the usual pervert main character superpowers, items that allow you to give anime girls bigger bonkhonagahoogs and of course, a literal gameplay mechanic calle the "Doki Doki Mode" where you touch anime girls where they like it. Trust me, I also cannot believe I'm writing this stuff myself.
But here's the thing: The game knows what it is. It knows the premise is absurd and tries to have fun with itself whenever possible, resulting in a game where much to my disbelief, is actually one of the most unique and fun experiences I have ever had, to the point I dare call it one of my favorites.

Truth be told, the game is actually incredibly well-written and is very entertaining from a story perspective. The dialogues that you read in the game, and especially the ones you get when it asks you to make a choice are witty with some light drama at times, making it clear that the development and localization teams were having a ton of fun writing them. And in terms of special events you get in middle of the gameplay in the form of minigames, they are unhinged and delve into fetish territory at many times. I honestly cannot name another game where it managed to constantly surprise me and make me laugh by introducing such activities.
This makes for a very enjoyable time going through the game for the first few hours, to the point I found myself eagerly waiting for the next visual novel section or minigame to start. But unfortunately, other aspects of the game are not as good as the story and writing, ultimately resulting in a subpar experience. Let's start with the length of the game first.

The game has multiple story routes that each take about 3 hours to complete, while also branching into three different endings (true, good, bad) depending on how much the affection meter of your route's target character is filled in the end. And the way you fill this affection meter is by getting high scores on the minigames and choosing correct dialogue options. Seems straight forward, but not when you realize the latter is bound to the main character's stats.
Before starting a new game, you have to choose between different personality types that each give you different starting values on your main stats: Intelligence, Athleticism, Style and Lewdness. Then you can raise or decrease each of these stats by buying specific items from the shop, or using the Doki Doki mode. These values are very important as the might cause some dialogue option to become unavailable. And if those dialogues are the ones needed for the true ending, you might be forced to start over or reload a previous save file.
Then we have the progression system. When you start the game for the first time, only two story routes are available and you need to unlock the rest by getting the good/true ending on the previously available ones. Now, let's assume you failed to get your desired ending on your first try. Taking that into account, you basically need to spend about 20 hours to get true endings for all main routes, and +40 hours to %100 the game. Even more if you want to see every ending. And this is simply too much playtime for a game with such limited gameplay style.

Rail shooter is a game genre that really doesn't give you a lot of freedom for innovation. No matter what you do, it will retain its arcade roots. The only thing you can attempt, is to make it in a way that the player would want to replay them. And this is where Gal★Gun: Double Peace stumbles as it really cannot persuade you to come back to it and finish other routes.
The game simply does not have a lot to offer in the gameplay department. You get multiple story routes to choose from with different minigames and dialogues, but everything else gets repeated. Levels, boss behaviors, introductory and ending sequences, encounter structure, musics, Doki Doki mechanic... all of them get repeated during your attempts. Hell, even the girl models get reused en masse and you'll see identical characters standing right next to each other and/or for multiple times through a single level. All of these gradually build up a severe feeling of repetition and boredom, especially considering how long it takes to fully complete the game.
Unfortunately, the actual shooting also loses its entertainment value pretty fast. You only see three types of opponents in the game aside from bosses. Branching paths don't have major differences and only decide whether or not you can get certain collectibles. Aside from collectibles, there's no global progression system like upgrades that carry over and there's no NG+ modes. And the usage of mouse as an input device makes the game trivially easy, with no new feature to compensate for the reduced difficulty. All of these points turn the gameplay incredibly stale and boring after a short while, to the point that even the writing cannot save it. I simply cannot bring myself to start another route anymore, even though I really like the writing and want to see more of it. I just don't want to waste 2 hours of my life doing something I don't enjoy just for that 1 hour of good stuff.

Unfortunately, there are other big issues as well.
The most notable issue is how unpleasant the camera system feels like when it asks you to shoot while moving. It works fine when you are stationary but when it comes to on-rails movement, the game quickly throws the camera around, creating this incredibly janky motion while also expecting you to shoot at collectables. Considering you need to zoom-in to see some of the collectables, this makes for a bad shooting experience if you want to go after them.
Then we have a lack of much needed sensitivity settings for the motions you have to perform in minigames. The ones that have you making straight lines are fine, but circular motions are incredibly stiff and imprecise, making them unbelievably difficult to do either with a mouse or a controller. There's a reason why "Tender Loving Care" achievement only has a %15 completion rate, and this is why.
I would also say something about the port quality but I never ran into any issues playing this on a Windows 11 PC, all while there are numerous reports of the game constantly crashing. So I guess this is one of those cases where your luck determines how well it performs.

Writing is witty and story events are unhinged in the best way possible, but gameplay is very limited and becomes boring very fast. Still, worth a try on a deep sale if you are even slightly interested.

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

I always get this thought that while western developers were always afraid of new ideas through time, eastern devs had not shied away from trying new things. Like, what if we had robots in the wild west? Or what if the president of United States piloted a mech and fought against the vice president?
VASARA games combine science fiction with Japan's history, creating this interesting mashup of mechanical beasts being piloted by the samurai. A premise that has ended up in creation of two unique shmups. And a collection that... well... let's talk about them, shall we?

The basics of VASARA 1 and 2 are the same as other shmup games. But they do offer a unique mechanic in the form of melee attacks. Each character has a melee attack with bullet clearing properties which is accessible by holding down the shot button and releasing it after a short time. The games even offer a powered up version of melee attack as a separate offensive/defensive mechanic in the form of vasara attack.
In the first game, you have access to the vasara attack in addition to bombs. This attack is bound to a bar at the top of the screen that fills by collecting jewels dropped from the enemies. When filled, you can use it to unleash an attack that covers a wide area and heavily damages enemies. Meanwhile, the second game removes bombs in favor of vasara attack slots being increased from 1 to 3.
But make no mistake, both of the games are still very hard in true arcade fashion. There are tons of instances where you either need perfect movements or prior knowledge of the incoming attack patterns to avoid being hit. And sometimes, this really proves to be an incredibly hard task thanks to the games' visuals.

Both VASARA 1 and 2 look gorgeous. Backgrounds & player/enemy sprites are very detailed, character portraits are very well-drawn and stages are very colorful. Normally, this is not an issue. But when we consider how much clutter you have to face, it does become one.
Basically the games have heavy screen clutter. You have enemies and background NPCs moving on the screen, gems constantly dropping from enemies, projectiles getting shot from you and enemies' sides, alongside various others. This results in visual elements blending in and it gets very hard to differentiate them, leading to unfair hits as a result.
And this gets worse when the enemies start using smaller projectiles. VASARA 1 starts introducing enemies that shoot smaller projectiles from the half-way point and in case of VASARA 2, it gets even worse. Every enemy projectile in VASARA 2 is either smaller or thinner compared to the first game, and is less noticeable especially with everything else that is going on. So it gets pretty easy for you to get hit by something and not know how it happened.

Obviously, screen clutter and poor clarity are big problems. But I find the games' behavior for their final levels much more infuriating and even insulting.
The final stages change the rules at the last second. If you die in the final stages and decide to continue, the games will throw you back to the beginning of the stages and force you to do everything all over again to get another shot at the boss. It's never fair to the player to change the rules in the final level, just to add some frankly unneeded artificial difficulty to the game. Maybe this was the norm for arcade games back then, but now? We're not playing them in arcades.
And this is such a shame, because such design decision basically nukes the fun and replayability of the games for casual and/or less experienced crowd. This is the final nail in the coffin that strips the game of all its fun factor, when put next to the heavy visual clutter.

The overall quality of this collection is... mixed. On one hand, it performs very well when it comes to technical performance. The dialogues all have translations. The gallery has a bunch of original and redrawn artwork (for a purpose which you will find out about soon), alongside promotional materials. And you are given a number of options to tweak your gameplay experience with. Then we have the problems.
The game's controller support is utterly broken and doesn't recognize a lot of controllers, leading you towards using Steam Input API. Furthermore, you are not able to do any button remapping in the game. The game's controls are pre-defined and it asks you to do your own changes from Steam Input settings, which the game keeps reopening every time you go into controls menu. And as for keyboard users... the game itself never provides a solution.
Not only that, there are quite a number of settings that require you to restart VASARA 1 and 2 even when they shouldn't. Want to change the visual filter or remove the art from the sides of the screen mid-game? They require a restart. Want a refresher on the controls or change the screen type and audio levels? Go back to the main menu. Most of these are not deal breakers, but it's pretty weird to see them like this while other collections allow you to do them on the fly.
And then we have the "but why?" kind of additions. For example, was there really a need to create a 3D menu for this collection? Sure, it looks somewhat pretty but serves no purpose. Especially compared to similar examples like Trine 2 which had the purpose of showcasing the game's visual prowess. Then we have the brand-new timeless mode...

Remember the redrawn artworks I mentioned earlier? Those were created to be used in a brand-new game mode: VASARA Timeless. And this new mode is...
I appreciate the devs trying to create an entirely new game mode with everything faithfully recreated in HD, but the end result is not ideal. This mode utilizes 3D graphics presented in 16:9 aspect ratio, allowing 4 players to play together simultaneously. It's clear a lot of work has gone into it and the devs want you to play it, as about %75 of the achievements are tied to this mode.
But I don't find it entertaining. Compared to the games it takes from, timeless mode is aesthetically very bland and boring. Instead of going through beautiful, history-inspired stages this mode has you flying over cliffs, barren grounds, beds of water and washed out flora. Not only that, enemy patterns feel very uninspired.
Then we have other shortcomings. First, it follows the bullet design mentality of VASARA 2, making them blend in with other visual elements. Second, the wide playing field makes a single player playthrough more challenging as enemies can attack you from any direction. Coupled with there being no i-frames at the end of a dash (a move exclusive to this mode), you can always get hit from somewhere that you were not expecting. Third, there are no continues in this mode. All of these make for an inferior experience.

I don't see this being enjoyable for the masses. The originals are very hard by design, and this collection not only has not succeeded in making them more accessible, but has quite a number of issues itself. Not to mention the new game mode not bringing much to the table.
I would only recommend this to diehard shmup fans. As for the rest, there are many shmups out there at the same price that do things way better. Wait for a sale if you really want to try this.


A mixed bag. The original games are fun, but clarity issues make them unfairly hard. And the collection itself does well on some parts, then completely screws up on some of the other important aspects

Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades

Let me tell you a story.
Back when Streets of Rage 4 was first announced, I thought it would fail to be a good game and refused to be excited for it, with the reason being DotEmu's involvement. A lot of my friends didn't get why I was so mad and I think that's because they never had any experience in having their nostalgia shattered to teeny tiny pieces by the utter negligence of this company.
Back then, DotEmu was utterly infamous for offering incredibly lackluster emulations of various retro games and never updating them properly. And the worst part was that many companies, and specifically SNK, kept giving them permission to do more of them. Such negligence ultimately caused the stores to be filled with broken re-releases of retro games, most made by one company...
...and Raiden Legacy is one of them.

On the surface, this game performs just like other ones that were handled by DotEmu. For example, the frame rate never goes beyond 57 fps and sometimes even drops down to 54. The emulation is also pretty wonky, with the games starting to stutter quite frequently throughout gameplay. But then the game starts introducing other issues that are incredibly baffling to see.
The menus, and I repeat, THE MENUS of the game are the most demanding part of it, each suddenly causing the application to hog more CPU than it really should (as high as %30) just for the actual emulation to only need a franction of that amount (%1 at max). Moreover, each transition between the menus freezes the game for a splitsecond. And this is such a surprise because the UI looks incredibly ugly, simple and amateurishly designed for it to be demanding; especially compared to other games that DotEmu has put out or even the GOG version of this game, which I will get to later. I mean... there's not even a music track playing in the main menu! Was that so hard to have a track playing from one of the games?
And then there's this issue with the game's settings messing with what they are not supposed to mess with. The game never respects your resolution settings, always reverting to the default with the culprit being the HD music option being active. How does a music option break resolution settings?! Or the portrait mode actually rotates your operating system's display instead of just the game's process, even in the windowed mode! Also, who in their right mind decided to have the confirm button do everything? Despite coming out in 2015, Raiden Legacy does not support using the left and right directions to cycle between available menu options. Instead, you need to cycle between them by mashing the A button (on a Xbox controller). Even DotEmu's previous releases had better menu navigation than Raiden Legacy on Steam, what's their excuse here?!

After suffering through the Steam version, I tried the "allegedly" better GOG version, just to find an entirely different build of the game. The GOG version seems to be a direct port from mobile and therefore has a much cleaner and more goodlooking UI, though the overall design really does feel out of place on PC. To my shock, the GOG version also runs at solid 60 fps and has no stuttering, but adds its own exclusive issues to the mix.
Contrary to the Steam version, the GOG version has no controller support in the menus, the default keybindings are atrocious (why the hell is the A button used for pausing the game?!) and each time trying to navigate the menus results in +10 seconds of the game freezing. I'm not joking, the freezing is so long that even Windows itself thinks the process has died.
So basically, DotEmu has created multiple versions of the same game, with each of them having different looks and their own problems that you cannot find in the other. I have heard of exclusive games and content, but exclusive bugs and issues? Truly marvelous. A groundbreaking move from DotEmu to move the bar of quality for their emulated retro games catalogue to a brand-new, previously unheard of low.

So, now we know that the collection's performance is all over the place. But how are the games themselves?
Well, you really can't go wrong with Raiden. This series of games have consistently offered a fun gameplay, unless we are talking about Raiden V which is... ugh..., and the games in this collection are no exception. The only problem here is how DotEmu has handled them, because the games we have here are not 1:1 arcade emulations and don't offer much customization. DotEmu's versions skip the intros and the "insert coin" screens using savestates, immediately starting you on main stages or the character/plane select. And this causes some issues.
First, we have the preservation concerns. Publishers like us to stop emulating games and buy their re-releases. But why should we do that if they constantly rip parts of those games away and make them incomplete? And don't you dare hit me with "but we don't need those" nonsense. Seeing the intros and gameplay demonstration popping up is a staple of arcade gaming. That's how many of us were intrigued to try those games. To take them away is just nonsensical
Second, the aforementioned fact means there aren't much settings to customize your experience both visually (like optional side arts) and gameplay-wise. The game never allows you to change the number of lives, credits and bombs in the arcade mode and doesn't even offer a coin insert button. So you are forced to beat all of the games with only 3 credits available. The only way you can have unlimited credits, is by beating all of the levels normally and then using the training mode, which is incredibly dumb if you ask me. Considering how challenging Raiden series can get, this is a very bad move that hurts casual playthroughs.

If you are still not sure about DotEmu's negligence during this game's development, then by all means take a look at the game's installation directory to see definitive proof.
The UI graphics used in the GOG version of this game are already present in the Steam version. And that's why a simple file change allows you to change your game version with ease. Not only that, this game also contains resources from Metal Slug 2 for some reason, which DotEmu had also worked on! You can literally find that game's menu backgrounds and even Marco's portrait in the game files!
How did they forget to take them out after all these years if they were placeholders? Why create different versions of the same game to make supporting them difficult? Why this one game has a significantly dumbed down UI design compared to all of their other retro emulations? Why leave all of the glaring problems intact for about a decade? Why re-use the mobile specific autoshot mode for the PC/Console versions where players have easy access to physical buttons?
Raiden deserved better than this. You deserve better than this. Avoid Raiden Legacy.


The games are fun, but Raiden (and you as the player) deserve better than a lackluster and lazily-made collection of savestates with major performance issues that are still there after almost 10 years