Hangeki Review

The thing about the indie development sphere – indeed, possibly the greatest thing about the indie development sphere – is that the pressure to create mass appeal is only as intense as you want it to be. People can make games for whatever niche audience they like – as long as they don’t mind not profiting, I mean – and as somebody who finds himself frequently sitting among such audiences, I am immensely grateful for this. Indie games don’t have to follow trends – although, as Steam Greenlight has made painfully evident, many still blindly do – and can be created for a time, place, and set of attitudes that have long since passed, or have yet to exist. Does anybody really still give a damn about I Wanna Be The Guy? I don’t think so, but there always seem to be a few masochistic faux-retro platformers hanging around in the background, so I suppose it must still be a thing.

Hangeki is a prime example of that: a game that’s been made for a very specific person. It’s a game for the people whose fondest childhood memories are of playing a slightly dodgy Galaga clone for hours at the local pizza takeaway; for the people who have a half-finished custom cabinet lying on its side in their garage; for the people who dream occasionally of visiting Japan and taking a gander at one of their multi-storey arcades. People who aren’t me, in other words. Before I had even launched Hangeki, I had already begun to pity it, knowing full well that it was never going to receive hospitality from any but the hardcore arcade enthusiast. The days when it would have dazzled people at a pizza takeaway, ravenously consuming their small denominations of money, are long gone. Nowadays they just pull out their sleek futuristic phone-computers and play a few rounds of some wretched free-to-play mobile game. Then, because history loves its sick jokes, they pour small denominations of money into it anyway. I hate the future.

Hangeki agrees. You can’t get much more old-school than an arcade shoot-em-up, after all. Enemies fly in impossibly tight formation on the top half of the screen, you fly around on the bottom, and bullets are exchanged until one side is obliterated. So far, so steady. Your actual gun fires automatically – which I’m grateful for, honestly, because I didn’t fancy the idea of holding down one button for about twenty minutes at a time – but you have up to four special weapons that consume your power meter, a big multicoloured bar that charges as you pick up shiny coins from dead foes. Your prerequisite screen-clearing bomb is actually worked into the game universe as the titular Hangeki, a really hazily-defined super-weapon that gets charged by killing enemies. Meters, weapons, aliens, spaceships. I can’t say I was expecting Hangeki to waltz in with an industrial leaf-blower slung over its shoulder and blast the shoot-em-up cobwebs away, but to its credit it plays around with the basic elements enough to draw you in.

Well, for about an hour, at least. At that point I had to stop, on the account of my eyes having shrivelled up into the approximate size, shape and colouration of a pair of dried prunes. I know Japanese-style action games have had a bit of a reputation for extravagant visual effects in the past, but honestly, did nobody involved in Hangeki ever look at it and go “I think we should tone this down a bit”? Even typical effects like your bullets are unnecessarily flashy, but with every level-up, special weapon or Hangeki activation the game starts packing in so many screen-covering starbursts and flying particles that your monitor might as well have gone supernova. Come on guys, this is as close to bullet-hell as it’s possible to get without actually being bullet-hell. Where do you get off making it so difficult to see what’s actually going on? And if you’re going to include options to turn down such effects, make sure that the slider actually goes between ‘Crowded nightclub full of malfunctioning strobe lights’ and ‘Retirement home at four o’ clock in the morning’. I rattled that slider back and forth, and even on the lowest setting it still felt like the game was embedding fish-hooks in my brain via the optic nerve. The delicious irony is that despite all of this, the game itself is actually downright ugly. At least ninety percent of enemy attacks consist of lines and circles ripped straight out of Microsoft Paint – although, somewhat mercifully, this at least makes them easy to distinguish from their environment – the ship designs are muddy forgettable blobs, and most of the backgrounds are featureless scrolling textures (with a cloudy overlay, if the game is feeling really fancy). Music? Well, it exists. That’s pretty much the only thing worth mentioning about it.

There’s something very strange going on with the actual action in Hangeki. It has all the right components, no doubt about that, but some of them seem to have been inserted upside-down. Rather than feeding you a constant stream of enemies, Hangeki dumps waves of them on you in a manner not entirely unlike Space Invaders. Destroying enough of them will charge the Hangeki itself and allow you to clear the remainder of the wave, so it’s less of a last-resort panic button and more of a bizarre execution ability that essentially lets you get away with only actually directly killing half of the enemies in any given wave. I think it’s supposed to be a means of keeping the adrenaline flowing, ensuring that you’re always fighting a large number of foes and avoiding the traditional problem of wave-based enemies where you tediously go back and forth, eliminating the last few stragglers with all the urgency of a cleaner scrubbing a particularly stubborn stain. It’s a nice idea, but it unfortunately spawns more problems than it solves.

You see, using the Hangeki isn’t just encouraged: it’s all-but forced upon you. Whenever it’s charged, more blasted effects crowd the screen and ‘HANGEKI READY’ appears in the middle in big blazing letters, a distraction that could only be exacerbated with the addition of a klaxon, or possibly a very small nuclear war. Every aspect of the game is geared towards smashing the big red button – alright, in the case of my spacebar that’s the off-white button – the moment your Hangeki is charged, but since you won’t get nearly as many coins from enemies killed in such a fashion it often becomes beneficial to leave it until later in order to better charge your power meter. This leads to a recurring situation of head-clutching stupidity where you’re trying to fight off the last few enemies even while the game shoves a sodding great big sign in your face. It’s a three-way fight between your patience, your ability to survive while dealing with an incredibly obtrusive obstruction, and how desperately you want a high power level for the next wave. Whichever one wins, you’re left disappointed.

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.