Riders 2491 Reviews

I love this kind of game. GREAT GRAPHICS< good playability, hard to play

I decided to play this because I happened to find it when it was on a 67% discount and it had a bunch of negative reviews. I like shmups, so why not try it out? This is the perfect example of how not to make a shmup: -You start with a pea-shooter but the only way to upgrade it is to get power-ups in the level (which are few and far between) or upgrade the shot power after every level, which still does barely anything -Specials only have a limited amount of uses and refresh extremely slowly (three to be exact) -Larger enemies are almost unkillable in the time they are on screen, with some even having shields that negate all damage done to them. You'll have to waste all of your special uses just to kill one or two of these guys -There is no option for slowdown in the controls despite all of the ships either being really fast or really slow -Every bullet has Raiden levels of speed, if not faster -The only way to remotely stand a chance against bosses is by saving your specials until you get to them, and that'll only get you about 75% of the way on the first boss on easy, if you don't they take ages to kill. Hell they barely do anything to bosses on Hard -Some bullets will go across the bottom of the screen at lightning speed and there's barely anything you can do about it -This game was built for use with a d-pad and a d-pad only. Switching to an analogue stick makes controlling any ship a chore on top of having no slowdown -Bosses are largely trivial and are only there to be bullet sponges, the only challenging aspect of them is their status effects -Regardless of the difficulty setting or whether the speed is set to turbo or not, bullets still have the exact same speed and density, the only difference is that bosses are EVEN tankier and spam status effects more often (no wonder "Easy" was so hard) -And on the topic of status effects, there's three that I've seen so far: slow, inverted controls, and teleporting. So, the boss might slow you down and then sweep a laser across the screen that's faster than you, invert your controls, or teleport right in front of you and kill you if you're unlucky enough (yeah, I've had that exact thing happen to me) It is not just unfair, it is horribly optimized and an absolute mess despite having somewhat appealing graphics. Only buy this if it's on discount, if you're a masochist, or a game dev that wants to make their first shmup. And to those working hard to bring us absolute peak shmups, do the exact opposite of what this game does. Though let's not leave empty-handed, shall we? Here's some freeware shmups you can play: Not on Steam: -XOP Ultra -XOP Ultra Black Label -Blue Wish Resurrection Plus -Kaikan (free version) -Cho Ren Sha 68K -Gwange Dash On Steam: -Bullet Hell Monday -Bullet Hell Monday Finale -Kaikan ($4 version) If you've got Retroarch: -DonPachi -DoDonPachi -DoDonPachi DaiOuJou -DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou -Mushihimesama -Mushihimesama Futari -Gradius V -G. Darius -Ketsui -Ketsui Arrange