Samurai Aces Reviews

Phenomenal shooter

TURBO MONK TIME.

Easiest Psikyo 1-all with sexy Aine.

Psykio's first-formed from ex-Video System team members.

I loved playing this one with my friend. It's unique and the samurai them is cool. I'm not the best at shmups and this one can be punishing. Try it with infinite lives. I would never have gotten through this without that.

Samurai Aces (AKA Sengoku Ace) was Psikyo's first shooting game and set the format they would stick with for the rest of their releases. It features a cast of playable characters with unique abilities, a randomly-selected stage order, short stages with multi-phase boss battles, and a punishingly-difficult second loop that can be accessed by clearing the game on one credit. Psikyo stuck with this formula and gradually tweaked it for later releases including the Strikers series, Gunbird 1 and 2, and Dragon Blaze, but this is its point of origin. Even though I'm a long-time fan of shooting games I hadn't played any Psikyo releases until I noticed these ports by City Connection here on Steam. I picked up several of them on sale, but Samurai Aces was the first one I was able to clear consistently and get all the achievements on. It's definitely simpler and more accessible than Psikyo's later games but still provides a decent challenge. This isn't a Cave-style bullet hell like DoDonPachi or Mushihimesama: the bullets are fewer, faster, and more deliberate. Each one has a purpose, whether it's aimed right at you or meant to corral you to a certain part of the screen. Be careful, though: the characters' hitboxes are larger than in more recent games and dodging within bullet patterns is a good way to lose a life. One minor issue I had is that the game doesn't do a good job explaining how to use the charge attacks: when you hold down the shot button, there's no indication that your character is charging anything up until the attack is ready to go, which may take several seconds for characters with long charge times. During this time you can't fire without cancelling the charge attack, so you have to balance the offensive impact of these attacks with time spent waiting for them to charge up. The port itself is functional and doesn't have any glaring technical flaws but is missing some features found in comparable releases. For example, there is only one leaderboard and it only tracks scores played on the default settings (normal difficulty, 3 lives, no continues). It would have been nice to have leaderboards for other difficulty levels. Also absent is any sort of practice mode. This makes it difficult to practice a specific stage, especially in the second loop, since you need to clear the first loop each time you want to attempt it. Even then, there's no guarantee you'll get the stage you want: each time you play, the game randomly selects the first three stages from a set of four. If the stage you wanted to practice is left out, tough luck! The role of luck makes Samurai Aces difficult to play for score. In order to compete with the top scores, beyond not dying or bombing throughout both loops, you need to have a run that: -Gets the city stage as one of the first three stages on both loops -Gets at least two bombs, preferably more, randomly dropped from the houses at the end of the city stage both times -Fights the left-hand boss at the end of the sky stage both times (50% chance each loop) -Gets the demon instead of the tanuki as the final boss both times Even so, Aces was a good first attempt at making a shooting game and it still plays well today. Its basic formula was refined in later games like the Strikers series and Gunbird and all the way up to Psikyo's final shooting game, Dragon Blaze. It's a good point of entry to players new to Psikyo games, but those with absolutely no shooting game experience might want to ease into the genre with something more polished and accessible.

Compared to Gunbird, Samurai Aces is much more difficult. It's not Raiden difficult, however. The difficulty lies primarily in the ships being too slow and the bullets being too fast. You'll get up to speed if you keep at it, though. I didn't care for Samurai Aces much at first; but the longer I played, the more I enjoyed it. I love the 80's/90's drawings, sprites, strong ancient Japanese themes, and wacky humor, which doesn't go over the top (unlike Gunbird). This game really takes me back. (I never played Samurai Aces previously, by the way.) The developers have done a great job, as usual, including the option to tune the level, lives, and continues to your level of skill. I warn you - even the easiest setting is difficult. Keep playing and you'll find a very enjoyable shooter experience. Summary Rating: 8

A flawed, but amazing game. The slow speed of your characters VS the sometimes very high bullet speeds makes certain sections unbeatable without memorization. Not every character's bomb is an instant bullet cancel either, which makes things really complicated for them. There are cheap deaths, but not so many that I'd write off the game. Overall, the game's presentation and gameplay is really good and a beginner can absolutely clear this with memorization.

City connection are knocking it out of the park with their arcade to console conversions and Samurai Aces is another well done arcade to PC/steam example. Game plays, sounds and looks as good as I could want on a 65" TV. As far as I can tell this is the arcade experience but without needing a 200kg cabinet and the space to put it somewhere. Thoroughly recommended to fans of arcade shoot'emups and game collectors.

This is another of the "first in a series" Psikyo arcade shooter from the early 1990s, in this case the prequel to the popular arcade & mobile hit "Tengai". It's a standard bullet hell shooter with a bit of a samurai theme in the characters, an odd crowd with some slightly wacky special attacks depending on who you pick. Like most of the other Psikyo series openers the game itself is meh and not much to write home about, and the difficulty level is unusually high. But I give it a thumbs up anyway because, like with all their other games here so far, the developers have done an excellent job with the quality of the port-it's arcade-perfect with the additions of extra difficulty levels, a "Score Attack" mode with online leaderboards and some nice graphical options. If you're not a Psikyo fan/collector you can easily pass on this one and just go with Tengai (which just hit Steam the day this review was posted) or the Strikers 1945 & Gunbird series, but if you are a fan/collector then despite this being a mediocre game overall it's worth buying to add to your collection and also to support the developer & publisher in helping them to hopefully bring more of these games to Steam. They have done a great job so far and despite very minor flaws the ports are virtually arcade-perfect.