From the opening tutorial, it’s clear that NGDEV’s latest 2D shooter is designed to make you an expert player.
Let’s be clear – Gunvein is a very purebred bullet hell shooter. From the very first stage, it slacks little, delivering an intensity reminiscent of some of the genre’s most demanding productions. It’s a title publicly announced by Cave heavyweights like Ketsui and DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou; a version where the bullet barrage rarely quiets down between the opening and final boss form.
However, Gunvein has a few tricks to bring out the best in you. Again, it’s very encouraging. Before you actually start playing the main game, it insists you take a tutorial on the founding principles of the wider genre, introducing things like managing aimed bullets, “cutting replay dodges,” navigating micro and macro bullet screens, and strategically telling you how far you’re going. The theory of how close the enemy is. This isn’t the place to detail every method, but even if you’re an old hand with a Cave 1CC list, this tutorial provides an excellent refresher. If you’re not a genre lover but yearn to play the most dense bullet hell at a capable level, Gunvein’s opening sequence might serve as a suitable primer to help you think like a high-level player; Most of the smoke and mirrors mentality helps you out of some very stressful situations.
Elsewhere, Gunvein is filled with enthusiastic encouragement about managing setbacks and seems to have absolute confidence in your ability to succeed. That’s not to say it’s a discounted shooter. far away. But rather than steer inexperienced players into diluted, easy modes, it makes us all masters.
Before delving into the game systems within it, it’s well worth considering the rationale on offer. NGDEV – known for its modern shooters for systems like the Neo Geo – teamed up with Mechanical Star Astra rising shooter design guru boghog to make Gunvein, which focuses on the confines of templates established by Cave, Toaplan, Raizing and many others Innovate the studio that originally planned what Bullet Hell could be.
This tradition also influences Gunvein’s tone and visual style, with everything from the ship and bullet designs to the landscape tumbling below draws rich cues from these classics. That’s not to say Gunvein is just a spinoff. Aesthetically, it might not be radically different, but it puts its own modern twist on the iconic bullet hell look, bringing a cleaner look than is usually seen in crunchy pixel art’s all-popular form. , Sharper performance. When we talk about tone, the game’s blaring music compliments and energizes the beat and sets the mood, while the clear, well-defined audio does an excellent job of conveying important information to the player during the action. For example, need to know when the maximum allocated homing missile has found a suitable target? A distinct sonic pulse will tell you this.
As far as visual style goes, the bullet patterns here and the broader level design elements are consistently excellent. The waves of ordnance that occupy the screen almost constantly thrive on bringing the perfect blend of static and random elements, meaning that while the more you play the pattern will become more familiar, there’s always enough variation Keeps you from becoming complacent or dependent on memory. They also do a lot of fascinating things that push you to be an agile, adaptable pilot. Meanwhile, the various enemy waves, set pieces, and larger enemy arrangements are expertly timed and positioned, resulting in a game with a pace and ferocity that’s overwhelmingly fun. The otherwise excellent boss fights can feel a bit drawn out by comparison, with some attrition wars carefully provided at times.
Gunvein confidently respects the genre’s arcade roots, and you’ll be given five stages built around a credit-based system across a vertical scrolling journey that takes you soaring above the war-torn landscape of the future. Gunvein offers a particularly aggressive shooting experience where screen domination is the way the game is played, and that means a frenetic, high-stakes approach that focuses on quick kills and presence throughout the game’s realm. It’s an exhilarating ride that’s rewarding and will leave you feeling overwhelmed with excitement long after you put the game down.
Taking the basic weapon system seen in DoDonPachi and many other games, you get a wide-angle lens that can quickly clear smaller “popcorn” enemies, and a powerful focused laser that slows down your own ship’s movement, while Putting all the power up front. There’s also an added homing missile element where you can lock on to targeted fire groups of enemies and terrain, then unleash a salvo that hunts down the target instantly.
That description probably fits quite a few other purebred bullet hell shooters by now — lock-on shots aside. But again, good shooter design is usually about innovating within the confines of the form, rather than trying to reinvent the genre. This is where Gunvein excels.
Bringing the survival and scoring games together conceptually to the triumph of the Gunvein, the Gunvein does it differently than most by making bombing one of the most useful pieces of equipment for maxing out scores. In so many shooters, bombs are all about survival, and their use often breaks things like combo chains and eliminates potential scoring opportunities. Not so with Gunvein.
At a basic level, scoring works like this. Quick kills fill up a meter. Every time this meter peaks, a collectable bomb fragment will drop. Collect enough bomb fragments and you’ll get the bomb. Drop a bomb, and everything that gets caught – or drifts into – its path is transformed into a cloud of golden stars, earning a ton of points. Then it’s back to earning more bomb fragments and starting the core loop again.
Play with enough aggression, cover presence and risk, and you can inject enough speed into the loop to bomb and score on a regular basis. It’s a system that asks you to keep going, taking risks, and being aggressive, resulting in an exciting and rewarding shooting experience. However, things are just a tad slower than what’s seen in Ketsui and its ilk. Despite Gunvein’s demanding nature and higher bullet count, it’s surprising how manageable it is to navigate the gorgeous swarm after a fairly short investment of time.
The game itself locks its online leaderboards to ten players each. In the meantime, you can go to Steam’s game leaderboard page to see all your scores. A decision that might seem odd, but the Gunvein team has clearly decided to honor the part of arcade culture where the best are entitled to special recognition. Present an irresistible pursuit; lay it out in the game, not around it.
At the same time, the three player ships bring a ton of potential changes both in terms of game feel and scoring strategies. Each has a unique balance of firepower, speed and lock-on range. Even more impactful, each also brings its own lock-on mechanics and bomb behavior changes, from location mines to destructive super-powerful lasers. All of this means there are many different playstyles and scoring strategies to explore. An easier difficulty setting does exist, though it’s certainly not patronizing, and the highest difficulty should be enough to trouble veterans of the genre.
There’s also a practice mode, as well as some “missions,” offering things like brief caravan challenges and boss rush sets. There’s even a very unique roguelike arrangement that throws the detailed structure of the arcade mode out the window, randomizing things, introducing an instant ship upgrade system, and offering all sorts of customizable parameters. Want to attack Gunvein on low difficulty, with high enemy spawn rates and no way to remember patterns? The roguelike series has it all covered and should please those less fixated on shooter purity.
Ultimately, Gunvein took a very familiar form. If you want something that reinvents its genre, you might want to look elsewhere. But by cleverly tweaking the conventions to ask players to explore new approaches and strategies, it presents a truly great shooter that’s always thrilling, offers enormous scoring depth to explore, and somehow elevates your own abilities.
So many modern shooters fall from the cave-crafted genre template. Gunvein is one of the absolute best of this huge group.
