CYGNI: All Guns Blazing - Arcade Mode (Hard) - 2 Loops Clear - 6,544,465 Pts.

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Developed by KeelWorks and published by none other than Konami, CYGNI is the first big mainstream AAA blockbuster Shoot' em Up in quite a while.
With big budget graphics, music and with former Pixar staff working on animation, the game is quite stunning.

Situation around this game feels a little like a deja-vu from when Sine Mora released back in 2012.
That game also made waves from the marketing and budget behind it, even though for all intends and purposes that game was basically a baby’s first shmup but with insane production values.
So now we have another remarkable combination of a studio making a game in a niche they know nothing about, with journalists that know nothing about that niche either, for an audience that also knows nothing. All while claiming the game truly is an innovative subversive masterpiece because shmups sure have come a long way since Space Invaders apparently.
You’re not innovating if all you’re doing is just repeating the same mistakes of the past.

Also known as the Crysis of shmups, since apparently for PC not even an RTX 4090 can run this without performance issues.

The game has two main modes; Story mode and Arcade mode.
Story mode is the usual meta progression mode with permanent upgrades that's stage-based.
While Arcade mode gives you access to all upgrades off the bat and makes you play all the stages in order.

Story mode is kinda weird.
It has 7 stages that are 10+ minutes each without checkpoints and no way to gain progression currency without actually beating a stage.
Slowly progressing through failing doesn't work and playing the game without upgrades also feels terrible. It's kinda the worse parts of both worlds. I can't imagine any hardcore player or casual liking this system.

Arcade mode is locked to Hard mode with only one life.
For some reason you can't even equip every upgrade here, you're limited to only choosing nine.
Arcade also loops indefinitely, but loops don't get harder.
Even in arcade they're finding ways to not allow you to have fun.

The soundtrack consists of a full orchestral score with immersive sound design.
While I think this type of music has its place, I don't think arcade action games are one of them.
These games are all about constant excitement and dopamine, and the music here doesn't really get me pumped to play the game and get me to hum along with the music while shooting enemies.

For level design I can only call this "Tatsujin Ou inspired".
Every section is needlessly dragged out with endless copy and paste of the same few enemies, which makes every section really overstay its welcome.
I wouldn't even say the stages are bad, just the endless dragging out really 'drags' the pacing down to a crawl and makes the game really monotonous. There is maybe like 30 minutes of design here, stretched out to 90 minutes.

The mechanics are strangely obtuse and somewhat counter-intuitive. Like some of the main mechanics are not even explained anywhere in the game and you need to find out about them by asking the devs.
You have 6 blue slots and 6 orange slots. The blue slots act as your shields while the orange slots all act as your missiles, your power level and your shottypes all at once. Shottypes do more damage on the later slots (like +10% on the 6th slot). The idea here is that you want to keep your missiles high because things are going to snowball if you keep losing power.
You get 13 hits before you die though, so you're mostly fine.

A bunch of these systems could have easily been automated, but are instead relegated to separate buttons that you constantly have to micro-manage.
Like items don't automatically refill missiles at max shields and converting shields to missiles doesn't automatically increase your shot power. You have to manually change this every time, it's a lot of annoying busywork that doesn't really add anything meaningful to the game.

The problems start at a more fundamental level though.
Movement has acceleration, so dodging is imprecise and feels bad. Tons of unbalanced and undodgeable patterns where the solution is to just throw a ton of shields at the player.
And nothing that really prevents the players from just circle strafing all the aimed patterns.
From what I hear basically everything went into graphics and everything else was almost an after-thought.

In terms of blockbuster movies, this has more in common with a lot of Marvel movie output: very flashy but without a lot of depth or purpose behind it.
That doesn't mean you can't have fun with it, but it's a very "brain off" game.

Buy the game on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/12...

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