Shinorubi — My eyes have melted

Explode literally everything in Shinorubi.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the greatest aficionado of the bullet hell sub genre. I like a good scrolling shooter, the likes of the recent R-Type Final 2 and the classic Darius games are a lot of fun, but as soon as you introduce eleven billion bullets on the screen at once with only a tiny margin for error I tend to give up and play something a little easier instead. I’m clearly not the video game adonis I once was. Shinorubi is something of a happy medium between a regular scrolling shooter and the bullet hell variant on most of its difficulties, but it can really crank up the insanity if you want a challenge.

I have no idea what the plot is. There’s something about someone invading another planet, but I only gleaned that from the game’s Steam Store page. There’s no explanation of what’s going on once you start it up. All I knew is that I was a spaceship, and there were a lot of other spaceships that needed to be exploded. So, I did just that.

Your ship — you can choose from three different ones in this Early Access release — can fire a regular attack that covers a lot of the screen but causes less damage, or a more focused laser that’s more powerful but also slows you down. You’ll need to flit between these two depending on what you’re facing. Smaller ships can be destroyed quite handily with the wider attacks, but larger foes and ground targets really need to be taken out with the laser.

Of course, all these opponents are shooting at you pretty much constantly, and you’ll need to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge your way through their bullets. Like many games in this genre, Shinorubi gives you a large ship, but only a tiny part of it is vulnerable, meaning you can weave through bullets more readily. Destroying an enemy also destroys the bullets they’ve currently released though, so you can make your job much easier by being aggressive. Your screen clearing bombs also have the same effect, making them a lifeline when you’re being swarmed.

Then there’s Fever Mode, which is a bar that fills as you cause damage with your laser attack. Triggering this turns all bullets currently on the screen into points for you to pick up, and causes all your attacks to generate extra points. I can’t count the number of times this saved me from disaster when facing a boss, and careful use of the different attack types can give you a moment’s reprieve when things are looking dire. I liked this feature, and it forced me to play more thoughtfully rather than just spamming one of two attacks.

Shinorubi has five difficulties at this point, and recommends you begin on Super Easy to allow you to learn the ropes. On this mode, and Easy too, you face far fewer bullets, and getting hit doesn’t kill you, rather it triggers any bombs you have in stock to keep you alive. This was a really neat way of making the game more accessible, but can become a crutch because once this is removed in Normal or higher, you have to focus far more carefully and trigger them yourself. Add to that the deluge of bullets and you’ll be in for a much stiffer challenge. Trying out Realist mode was utterly insane and I reached Stage 3 before running out of lives.

There is an element of nicety here though, as Shinorubi gives you all the continues you want, so you can start again from where you left off with a new batch of lives. This, of course, massively affects your score, and seeing as this is something of a score chasing game, that kind of defeats the point. You’re told early on that the goal of the game is to beat each difficulty using a single credit, so you can practice as much as you like before trying to beat each setting in earnest.

This is a very short game though, with only five stages that can all be run through in about 30 minutes. Obviously you have the score attack element, plus each stage challenges you to collect all the medal pickups in a single run, but this alone wouldn’t be a lot of content for the price. Thankfully, there’re a lot of additional features outside the main game. 

Firstly, there’s the choice of three ships — with another five to be added later — which play very differently to each other, offering some nice replay value. Then there’s the slew of extra modes, from standard Boss Rush modes to the far less standard Pink Pig mode in which you need to collect pigs. Whilst these may not be utter game changers for some players, they do make Shinorubi’s price point more palatable. As fun as the core gameplay is, that alone wouldn’t justify the price to me.

The visuals are a lot of fun, and very flashy with explosions going off every half second. The downside here is that it’s generally hard to see what you’re shooting at. Bullets are clearly defined however, meaning you can always get out of the way of incoming attacks if you’re skillful enough. There is a distinct lack of variety in environments and enemies though. Most of the stages involve flying over forests, and the opponents are small variations on each other at most. This extends to the bosses too, with pretty much every stage having a very similar combination of silver and green spaceship parts that do little to define them. It’s hardly game-breaking, but I think a lot more creativity could have been shown here, and if you think of the most iconic scrolling shooters, you can probably think of more than a few bosses that you took on.

The sounds are absolutely fantastic though. The lasers and explosions are one thing, and a good thing at that, but the soundtrack is spectacular. The utterly bananas guitar riffs punctuate the thrilling action wonderfully, and is certainly a highlight here. I would like to have more than one boss theme though, as hearing one repeated five times in a run is a little samey.

Ultimately, whilst there is more content to be released for Shinorubi, its only weakness lies only in its lack of variety in its design. The gameplay is fun and has plenty of ways to play, but the visual and sound design, whilst impressive in their own rights, lack creativity after the solid first impression. There’s a really fun game here, and I’ll be popping back in periodically to see what’s been added. Until then, I’ll give my eyes a chance to recover.

Shinorubi is available via Steam Early Access now.