Holy crap, this game is beautiful. Featuring gorgeous pixel art with a configurable CRT shader, this game is a cross between Metal Slug and Wild Guns. This is a neo-retro game by Zenovia Interactive, who also made Steel Assault.
Here’s the title screen. So beautiful. The music at the title screen is very Vangelis’s Blade Runner-inspired synthesizer. FANTASTIC!
There are two characters, Angelo and Mariana. Mariana is so beautiful, so I always play as her. There doesn’t seem to be a difference in how these characters handle. The character animations are very well made. It took me a bit before I realized that busty Mariana’s boobs bounce as she runs. It’s very natural and pretty bouncing, and not over-the-top exaggerated as many games are like. Nowadays there are so many Japanese-made games with girls featuring what I call “moon boobs” because it looks like the are nearly weightless. It looks creepy and I can’t stand it. Here Mariana’s tits bounce like they have proper weight to them.
Character designs are by Tsukasa Jun of Psikyo fame, who did the designs for games like Gunbird and Sengoku Blade. Kickass.
The Blade Runner/cyberpunk scenery is wonderful, showing New York streets covered in snow. The lighting is gorgeous, and you will see light sourcing at work. The graphics make this game more reminiscent of 24-bit Neo Geo games rather than the 16-bit Super Famicom.
The left trigger button locks the direction of your shooting while the right trigger button has you stand in one place while you can aim around you. There is a dodge roll to duck bullets like in Wild Guns and you can parry bullets and knock the bullets back where they came from, or you can hold the button down to enter “bullet time” and you can change the direction of the bullets. The parry acts as a melee attack which does stronger damage than your gun, helping you make short work of stronger enemies at close range.
At times the enemies are in the background. Use the RB button to fire at them. Here you can take cover behind the police car. In the game, you fight against the enemy gang members as well as the corrupt NYPD apparently.
You steal a racing bike and action ensues on the road. You can shoot at the background or foreground as well as behind, front, and above you. The above screenshot was taken with the CRT filter disabled.
Here is your bounty: a yakuza guy.
You have to take out this mobile weapons truck’s cannons as well as shoot at your target bounty guy who is in the open doorway shooting at you.
Finally you fight him after the truck is destroyed. He will fly into the background as well as shoot at you from the foreground. You have to wear down his shield until he dies.
Here’s the game over screen. I could beat the game in Medium mode, but not in Arcade mode. It’s pretty tough in Arcade mode as there are no checkpoints.
This is just the free demo of the first level. I’m really looking forward to when this game gets released! What’s more, I did not have to specify any compatibility tool version to get this to work on my Linux desktop. The game just loads without having to do anything. Nice!
EDIT: I didn’t have the same luck running the game on my laptop. I had to enter this for the boot option to get it to work: PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%