Hangeki Review

Alright, let's move onto something a bit more positive. If you're like me, and high scores stopped mattering to you around the time they were put on a global stage, you might not see much replay value in Hangeki, but in that regard the game definitely makes an effort to extend a hand out and downward slightly to us mere mortals. While there are a few alternative modes – a boss rush, an 'endless' mode, a set of slightly gimmicky challenge stages – the real draw is in the special weapons. You only start with a handful, assigned in whatever order you like to the ever-so familiar QWER keys, but as you progress the game starts drip-feeding you new ones until you've amassed a fairly formidable armoury. For the most part none feel especially ineffective – although you'll definitely develop a set of favourites soon enough – and there's enough variety on display to keep you interested in unlocking more. From there it's only a matter of time before the maddening 'collector' mindset sinks in, and you start doing every last optional challenge in the hopes of obtaining them all. It's like Pokemon for ridiculous particle-spamming sci-fi armament.

Unsurprisingly, Hangeki's highest point is the boss battles, which subtract the Hangeki itself from the formula, concentrate on fixed patterns over the chaos of wave-based attacks, and are at least imaginative in operation if not in visual design. While most of them just resemble over-designed metallic blobs with stripes and spiky bits everywhere, their attack patterns are unique, difficult to work around, and perhaps best of all, encourage you to try out different weapons. This boss flings chains to either side of me, so I need a weapon that fires laterally; this boss's projectiles are solid objects, so I need to replace my energy shield with some means of destroying them; this boss is a pushover who turns up to the fight with a note from his mother, so I can concentrate on big wave-clearing weapons instead; so on, so forth. I still can't beat the last guy, though, on the account of him firing out more giant lasers than a Disaster Area concert.

Technically speaking, I could dodge around such lasers, but 'technically speaking' is a real weasel of a term, you know? When the game starts to knuckle down and fill the screen with projectiles, all I want in the entire world is tight, responsive controls and a distinct hit-box – and maybe a Gunmetal remake, though that's always kind of at the back of my mind – but Hangeki can only look at my requests and shrug. Your ship moves quickly and has a little bit of inertia to it, which is great if you're flinging yourself from one side of the screen to the other – as is often necessary – but for threading your way through a lattice of deadly Fill Tool beams it's about as useful as a tea tray on a frozen pond. This game cries out for a 'focus' button, or at the very least some means of slowing yourself down. It is the missing piece of the puzzle; the one thing Hangeki needs to make things work and ensure I don't pick at least two shield-based weapons for every challenging mission. Such defensive measures really do seem to be almost essential later on. Maybe I'm just not enough of a shoot-em-up connoisseur to appreciate the subtleties of the level design, but some of the waves that Hangeki throws at you just seem to be a deliberate slap to the face to anybody who didn't pack a shield. You can only hope to stare in disbelief, in the brief moment before every possible inch of free space is rendered deadly, at the rows upon rows of foes charging their lasers. Unfortunately, staring in disbelief requires a fully-charged power meter, so that's not usually an option.

Reviewing Hangeki from a non-enthusiast's standpoint was always going to be an inadvisable task. I can only wade through the uncharted shmup swamp, armed with a general understanding of what is and isn't fun, clutching my few precious scraps of shoot-em-up knowledge to my chest like a sacred charm. Then again, chances are that you're not an enthusiast either, so perhaps an outsider's perspective is exactly what you need. What does this outsider say? Hangeki is tolerable. It combines a fairly unique shoot-em-up experience with the quiet joy of assembling a collection of deadly weaponry, and while you can certainly call the actual effectiveness of some of its features into question – let me unleash some more complaints at the screen-clearing bomb, go on – they worked well enough to make me play past the point of necessity. If you're a hardcore shoot-em-up fan, then chances are you will either pick up on a million niggling issues I didn't notice, or you'll have an unprecedented appreciation for Hangeki on a level that I could never attain. If you don't play shoot-em-ups, this is probably as good a point of entry as any. Just remember to wear sunglasses before playing.