played a japanese indie vertical shooter called BulletGarden and i’m really enjoying it.
BulletGarden is all about the enormous weapon list. there’s hundreds of weapons you can get, and most of them do different effects than you’d expect. for example, one is a penguin that slides upwards and spits an ice crystal on first attack, looping around through the bottom if it doesn’t collide with an enemy. your ship can get up to 5 different weapons firing at the same time, all of them wild.
there’s two modes:
- a mission mode, where you play short levels with different goals, often with specific static loadouts, but also sometimes with random ones.
- an endless mode, where you can go in with a random loadout (picking up powerups will give you any weapon at random) or a customized loadout (determining what weapons you use as you power-up)
you earn meta-currency to unlock the weapons for your customized loadout by picking up “seed” powerups while playing. 5 seeds = 1 gacha pull. seems fairly generous, you can earn enough for multiple pulls in one endless session no problem, and you can always play full random or mission to try out weapons you don’t have yet.
the bgm is a basic chiptune track, and all the weapons and enemies and enemy deaths contribute to the song. your weapons and enemies fire on the beats as well, to reinforce this. the end result is something pleasingly musical. i didn’t expect this at all so that was nice to discover.
the scoring system is thematic too. it’s about shooting your way through yggdrasil, and there’s a “seed/planting” theme, so scoring involves pumping enemies full of points with lower-damage attacks and then killing them to bank. like “planting the seed” and “reaping the harvest”. cool stuff.
super clever, highly recommended. saw it for $4 and couldn’t resist, has almost no reviews. says it’s not supported in english but that’s because the lore and armory descriptions aren’t. all the important gameplay stuff is translated into english.