Cygni: All Guns Blazing

What is it? A Xevious-style shoot 'em up, and a suitable on-ramp to the bullet hell.
Expect to pay $30
Developer Keelworks
Publisher Konami
Reviewed on Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 TI, Intel Core i7-12700F, 16 GB RAM
Multiplayer? Yes
Out August 5, 2024
Steam Deck Playable
Link Official site

The average level in Cygni: All Guns Blazing is about 15 minutes long, give or take, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like a two-and-a-half hour special effects showcase that ought to have ended with a fade to black and “Directed by Michael Bay” in big, bold letters. Cygni’s audio-visual bombast is difficult to overstate, with its Unreal Engine 4-powered hordes of alien jet fighters screaming toward you from above and below. The sheer number of models, bullets, and particle effects on screen is frequently overwhelming, and if your attention lapses for a moment, you’ll lose all sense of what’s happening.

After just a couple hours of playing, I felt like my senses had been jackhammered to sludge —and it was intoxicating. That might seem like an overreaction to mere action setpieces, but an extravagant, 16:9, superbly polished, graphically souped-up shmup like this is a rare thing indeed. Don’t get me wrong, I love my pixel art, but dodging incoming trains, taking potshots at a flying space whale, and blowing apart sleek alien tanks is riotous when it looks and feels this good. It runs like a dream, too, aside from some frame drops in the especially chaotic final level.

Mechanically, its shoot-’em-up antics will be quite familiar to any fans of Ikaruga or Radiant Silvergun. All the bedlam of a bullet hell is on offer, but its pace is a touch more palatable for those who don’t infuse their tap water with Red Bull. In fact, Cygni is quite accessible for a shmup; in a genre where you typically can only fire straight ahead, the game allows you about 30 degrees of leeway to the left or right, which means you can fire at cheeky angles and comfortably zoom around the field like it’s a