BULLET SOUL INFINITE BURST / バレットソウル - インフィニットバースト - 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] [b][i]LAST TIME ON BULLET SOUL...[/i][/b] A promising, new shmup game enters the foray. It shows great potential, ready to prove itself as one of the greatest among its peers. But when it comes to its actual performance, it cannot do as well as everyone had hoped. The game vanishes and then returns with a brand-new form after 3 whole years, promising that it will be better than before this time around. Will the game be able to fix its shortcomings, being remembered for ages as a mighty shmup? [h2]Apparently not![/h2] I honestly, truly cannot believe this is what the developers came up with after 3 years of the original game being out on the market. I did not expect them to go out of their way and remake the game from scratch, but also did not expect to see them changing the gameplay in a way that hurts the overall experience even more, with the additional content being something that doesn't warrant a new release and could have been added as DLC. If you have not read [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/TDP-X/recommended/544580/]my review on the original game[/url], I recommend you to do so before continuing as the core of the gameplay has not changed and a lot of my points still stand. What you get in Bullet Soul: Infinite Burst's normal modes is almost everything that was already in Bullet Soul, with gameplay's shortcomings and clarity & difficulty issues staying intact. Even the launch issues were the exact same. There are a bunch of changes that are welcome, but unfortunately they bear no effect on the gameplay. To name a few of those good changes: Enemies who were exclusive to the original game's caravan mode now appear in this version's normal modes, which differentates the experience to a small degree if you have already played the original. Score calculation at the end of a stage can now be sped up. Main bosses now get a visual alert before facing them and also have a visible countdown timer. The brief invincibility frames on some of the bosses have also been seemingly removed. And finally... the new music tracks are really, REALLY good. [h2]It has changed... but not for the best[/h2] Seems like the developers saw all the criticism about the game's difficulty and decided to tweak it, but the way they have done so is incredibly mixed at best and really bad at worst. I'm saddened to say that the developers' solution for the original game's easy and dull gameplay is enemy and bullet spam. They have tried to raise this version's difficulty and challenge by increasing the number of enemies appearing on the screen, increasing the enemy projectile speeds, adding brand-new dense bullet patterns to the mix and also introducing enemies that only remain on the screen for a very short time so you won't have much time to shoot them down. And they have done this in an uneven and uncurated manner imho. If the original was very easy in the main stages and got hard when you got to the bosses, Infinite Burst's difficulty curve starts fluctuating in middle of the main stages. One moment you are moving down enemies with literally no effort, and then all of a sudden you will see the screen filled to the brim with enemies and bullets. And in some cases, like the bossfights, the bullet patterns seem nearly undodgeable at times. These all feel like desperate attempts to make sure you always have something to dodge and hope it fixes the dullness. Which it doesn't. This enemy/bullet overuse also makes the screen readability situation even more dire as now there are way more things on the screen that can blend with each other. And to make matters worse, some enemies can now enter the playing field from literally behind you, in addition to the sides of the screen. In fact, many enemies now arrive and shoot from the lower parts of the screen even from the early levels, greatly increasing the chance of getting hit by something you didn't see coming. [h2]Did... did that anime girl just tell me that I suck?[/h2] Infinite Burst also adds entirely new things to the mix. One of these additions is the brand-new Burst Mode, where Bullet Soul turns into Crimzon Clover. A bootleg version of Crimzon Clover, to be precise. This mode ditches bombs in favor of the new burst ability. By defeating enemies, coins will drop from the enemies for scoring purposes and also a gauge at the side of the screen will gradually fill up. When the gauge is full, you can press the bomb button to trigger a time-limited burst mode, resulting in a massive power increase and all of the newly dropped coins turning into a variation with higher score value and the power to extend the burst time. You can keep the burst mode going by constantly collecting coins, or end it prematurely by pressing the button again and unleashing a bomb. Now this seems fun when you read it in the text format. When you play this mode, you realize pretty quickly that it's not really much different from the main game anyway; It's the same thing with all issues and boredom intact. And it also has issues of its own. The burst gauge fills up too slowly for it to make an impactful difference, and its rainbow colored primary shot just worsens the visual readability issue. THe enemy and bullet patterns are still uninspired. While the game switches your health with a rechargable shield in this mode, the shield pickups refill a laughably small amount of it. The characters will utter a voice line upon picking up any coin during burst mode, which really gets on your nerves after a while. The only positive change this mode has and I am utterly baffled on why it has not also applied to the other modes, is the fact that bullets actually disappear after an enemy's death. No, they don't turn white and stay on the screen; They cease to exist. The devs removed this unnecessary visual element in one mode instead of removing it from the whole game and I have no idea why. [h2]Yo dawg heard you liked dullness. So we put dullness in your dullness so you can be twice as bored.[/h2] The next addition to Infinite Burst is... UNLOCKABLES! By fulfilling certain requirements, you can unlock a number of artworks and also a hidden game mode called "Musou Mode". It's exciting to see they actually added something like this, right? What if I told you they are all worthless letdowns? There are only 4 artworks in the whole game, each showing up on the screen after beating the campaign mode with any character. And to unlock Musou Mode, you have to beat the campaign with each of the 4 characters. In other words, you have to play through the same, boring game 4 times for a game mode which is literally Burst Mode with unlimited burst gauge! Your reward for going through a boring experience multiple times is a game mode that is even more boring because it literally has no challenge in it! Can that really be considered a reward? [h2]TL;DR[/h2] Tries to enhance the experience of the original game utilizing new changes and features, but still cannot be better than the dull game it once was. There are way better shmup games to play out there.