BULLET SOUL / バレットソウル - 弾魂 - Reviews

[quote]Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades [/quote] 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... [b]And I went through all that FOR WHAT?!!!![/b] [h2]We have Crimzon Clover at home[/h2] 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. [h2]I Have Eyes and Yet I Can't See: The Second Coming[/h2] 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. [h2]I don't want to play this game anymore[/h2] 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. [h2]Closing thoughts[/h2] 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... [h2][url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/TDP-X/recommended/545060/]To be continued in Bullet Soul: Infinite Burst's review...[/url][/h2]

[h1] Decent shmup with great soundtrack and lots of different enemies. Amazing visuals and engaging wave patterns. 3 characters to choose from. Challenging bosses that will make you scratch your head and think - what the heck is that? One of the key elements in gameplay is that enemy's bullets disappear when you take them down. Make sure to check out the sequel. Japanese vibes inbound! [/h1]