Man, acute and reflex angles! They make me so angr…oh ANGELS. I thought it said…never mind.
Shmups (shoot ’em ups if you like) have grown ever more difficult over the years. Coming from the era with R-Type and Gradius, seeinggames like Deathsmiles and Ikaruga terrifies me. Bullet Hell they call them. Frame perfect madness might be a better description for them though, with literally screens full of lasers, bullets and missiles to avoid via pixel perfect movements. They become more memory and pattern recognition games rather than shooters as your focus is solely on evasion and hoping your attacks find their mark in the meantime.
More recently though, there have been games in the genre that seem more like shooters and less like dodgers. Saviors and Astebreed lightened the load on the player whilst Luftrausers went for a survival style of gameplay. And now we have Furious Angels, which aims to be somewhat like the latter.
In Furious Angels, you take control of a jet on an air-based mothership, tasked with holding off waves of enemy aircraft for as long as possible. You’ll face small jets, bombers, heavy fighters, mine layers, and carriers (which will flat out murder your mothership) in your efforts to survive as long as possible. All you have is your manoeuvrability, regeneration, and the ability to upgrade your aircraft mid flight through defeating large numbers of enemies. You won’t last long, but you’ll have a blast whilst you do!
There are only a few upgrades, changing you from a small plane, into a larger more powerful one, before becoming a flying tank with missiles, cannons and a ton of health. Once your tank form is destroyed, you’ll return to your basic vehicle and will need to build back up. You can repair your aircraft at any time by stopping firing for a few seconds (this includes your tank) before returning to the fray. This is one of the core ways to do well, managing your attacks vs. your repairs can keep you alive a lot longer although doing so is difficult, especially when you have the slow moving powerhouse of a tank. It’s a pity there aren’t more forms of upgrade, or options on what upgrade to take. As it is, your options are fairly limited throughout the game and your upgrades will come at set points once you have defeated enough enemies.
Initially I played this using a controller, which was fine, but I found playing with a mouse more effective. Your engines are bound to the right mouse button, with guns on the left, somewhat like Luftrausers. The game can easily be played with a single hand when using the mouse which is rather nice and this simplicity in its play style is one of Furious Angels’ biggest strengths. Due to the games being so quick (I survived about 3 minutes at best) and the score-attack nature of the game, you can rapidly get pulled into a “just one more game” mindset before realising you’ve been playing for an hour. You may well find yourself learning the waves to try to beat your previous best and climb up the leaderboards. The waves are altered regularly and the leaderboards reset to keep the game fresh and competitive.
The game looks good, with bright colours and easy to identify enemies in the air. Crashed carriers appear on the ground below you whilst explosions surround you in the sky amongst the rockets flying back and forth. It becomes crowded but maintains a steady frame rate even on the 5 year old laptop I’m playing on. It would be nice to have more variety in the environments as the one you have, whilst pretty enough, is a little bland after a few rounds. The sound is fine, with music that builds in intensity as the waves become more chaotic, but the background music becomes samey after a while. The sound effects are somewhat underwhelming though, with explosions lacking ‘oomph’ and weapons sounding somewhat feeble.
I should point out that I came across an odd issue when launching th game the first time. It said I was running the wrong version and wouldn’t allow me to play. I found that it was a clash with AVG and deactivating AVG, running the game once, and then reactivating it prevented the problem from occurring again. The developer was quick to respond in the forums when I brought the issue to light and was quite happy to help. They seem to be active with the community right now and are interested in adding content to the game over time which I would very much welcome. It’s good to see a developer discussing their game with the community and I hope they continue to work on the game.
Furious Angels is a good, enjoyable game that is a lot of fun in quick bursts. In fact, with a good control scheme I could see this working rather well on mobile platforms. Whilst it’s a little light on content, it’s fairly well polished with potential to grow if the developer sticks with it over time. Above all though, it’s fun. There are plenty of games that are huge in scope but bland to play, so I’m quite happy to play a small game that’s as enjoyable as this. Good luck to MorfeoDev with this and future projects. There’s a lot of potential with them.
