CYGNI: All Guns Blazing - Review

When it was revealed that Konami would be publishing a brand new shmup game, it felt right as in the 80s they were the king of that genre. But lately, their efforts have been focused more on Yu-Gi-Oh and releasing collections of their classic games. Thankfully the development of Cygni: All Guns Blazing was being done by KeelWorks, but this was their debut title. The question that needed answering, could a studio that are not known for makings games and another not known for making much new recently, come together to make something fun?

There is a story to be found here, humanity left Earth and found themselves into a new system, with a few planets capable of supporting life. One such planet was Cygni Prime, which was found to have microbial life, but not much else, it was however a good mix of land and sea. Landing on the planet, giant machines were found to be all over the place, these dead machines were very advanced and while humanity was eager to use them, they used caution and sought out the creators. After years of searching, nothing was found, but the wrecks remained, so humanity began to use them for parts, creating technological leaps with what they were learning. All was going well, until the machines woke up and that is where the game kicks off. The story is told in two ways, the first are cutscenes at the start and end of missions, the rest is found in the lore sections off the main menu, with more details provided the more missions that you clear.

While the story has some interesting moments, you are not going to be playing a game like this for a story, it would be akin to playing Tetris in order to make art from the blocks. For the most part, anyone who has played any shmups before, will feel right at home here, except for it being wider rather than taller. The basics are the same, you move around the screen, enemies come at you from the top and you shoot them down. Where things are different is that you can target the ground, and swap between your weapon and shield. Ok, so that last part may not have made much sense, what I mean is that your ship has both a shield and weapons, but there are levels to both and as you collect the energy shards that some enemies drop, you can power them up. But it only works if that is selected, so if you are currently focused on your attack, your collecting of energy shards will increase your firepower, but your shields may not take as many hits. So, you will need to swap between the two as you go, I did find that I really didn’t think about it too much, until I got into boss fights, as I would often need more power for the guns over shields.

The system actually lets you swap power between the two systems as well, so if your shield is about to collapse, but your gun is maxed out, you can transfer some power to it, to give it a boost. You can do it in both directions and at any time, as long as you have the energy to spare and when I did it, I would often throw it back and forth, just to ensure I was confident I was doing the right thing. Regardless if you are playing in the story mode or the games arcade mode, being able to manage both aspects of your ship is going to be something you will need to understand, if you want to survive. There were times when I was so focused on attacks, that I found myself getting blown up by attacks and obstacles that I just didn’t see coming.

In addition to power management, you can also target the ground, which can turn the tide for the ground forces fighting below you. The first time I saw a battle raging on the ground, I just watched, as I have been so conditioned from other shmups to not engage, but as the enemies from the ground kept shooting at me, I realised I was missing something and after dying I wanted to find out why. Turns out the game has a tutorial, which wasn’t something it prompted from me to do first, but that explained how you can attack the ground forces. Going back into the mission, I was able to dominate them and I felt strong, but the game doesn’t just do one enemy attack at a time, so there was a constant juggle between attack those in the air with me and those on the ground below me.

Thankfully, the game has a nice mechanic that you can dive into as much as you want, customisation. As you complete runs, you will earn points and you can then use those to buy upgrades for your ship. These can be weapon modifiers like shooting wide versus narrow or unlocking drones for additional support. You can also save a layout, if you want a lot more wide area attacks vs all narrow, swapping them out between missions. There are not a lot of options here, but for those willing to spend the time tweaking the loadouts, it could be worth it.

One of the big things for the game is that the developers have called out the cinematic nature of it, things will look better and all that. For the most part that is very true, the game does look good, the human characters you will only see during cutscenes, so nothing really to report there, the ship and enemy design however is where it’s at. The ship that you are in, is very large in cutscenes, but when you see it in action, it appears quite small and this is a good thing, as it helps put some of the enemies into context. Most of the early cannon fodder are small, but the enemies quickly grow in size from there, many of them are slightly larger than your ship and some a fair bit bigger. Once you see enemies on the ground that are bigger than your ship, you will appreciate the size of things even more, but those bosses, that will really deliver home the scale of things.

Sadly for as great as the game looks, that visual wow comes at a cost, as the game lagged a lot for me. Now when I say lagged, I don’t mean it got hung up on something for seconds at a time, but rather than whenever enemy ships exploded around me, the big ones that is, they would leave behind massive debris fields and smoke, which look great. The problem is each time those explosions happened the game would skip a beat, and when you have six or so explosions happening within 10 seconds, those moments quickly become annoying. This wasn’t a constant issue, there were times when I didn’t notice any, but when it happened, it stood out for me.

For the games audio, there isn’t much to say, as most of the games music is covered by explosions and your ship blasting lasers everywhere. The bosses have a great mechanical/animalistic voice to them, which again helps with their size. When you are in menus, you can enjoy the games soundtrack, but in game, I just found it overwhelmed by the action taking place.

Cygni: All Guns Blazing is a fun game, the story mode can take a bit of effort, especially on the harder difficulty, but it isn’t the longest story around. The games arcade mode honestly has throwback vibes to games of yesteryear, but those shiny graphics make it feel totally fresh. The balancing act between weapons and shields, as well as ground and air, does make things more challenging than you might have been expecting, but once you master it, you will feel in control. The games upgrade system isn’t as deep as it could have been and there are a few times when the performance suffered, which is not great. If you have never been one for the shmup genre, there is nothing here that is going to convince you otherwise, however if you are a fan, this honestly feels like the natural evolution of what makes the genre so much fun.

The Score

8.5

Review code provided by Konami

The Pros

The games story, while not deep, does have a fair bit going on which was a surprise

Shooting feels great, but dealing with weapons and shields makes the frantic action fun…

The Cons

… but if you can’t grasp that balancing act, the game might feel to punishing at times

The upgrades are fun, but don’t feel as deep as they could have been