CYGNI: All Guns Blazing

I bounced off of this game a couple of times. I wanted to like it, but it just didn't click. After finishing the game on Easy today I feel this is a very misunderstood title. You basically have to play it on Easy to start. All the mechanical pieces will fall into place. You'll grasp the shield\power and air\ground mechanics and upgrade your ship along the way in Easy which enables you to handle Medium (default) difficulty. Had they just started you off on the "Easy" setting but named the difficulty levels something like Normal, Hard, Extreme and set Normal as the default instead it would have made all the difference in reviews. Once this game clicked with me, it is an outstanding game and shmup. The graphics are spectacular! The controls are outstanding once you wrap your head around what you're doing. The sound is masterful; the echo of the explosions and depth of it is so cool. Upgrades to the ship are game changing and deceptively simple. Take a moment to understand how to set your gun width combinations, it makes a huge difference. It's not your typical shmup; you will get hit, it's impossible not to (for mortals) it's about balancing your shot width\angle, shields, and missile…

On papers, I'm the perfect audience for this game: I've played enough classics to know and understand the convention, and appreciate innovations and divergences from the norms, but not too attached to what the genre has always been to reject any deviance. This game promised to bring new things to the genre with budget, high-fidelity audiovisual, beginner-friendliness, and appeal to veterans. I think it succeeded only on the first two. I'm very annoyed, because Cygni half-arses everything it does: - It allows right stick aiming, but barely about 30 degrees on each sides. - The pleathora of energy point drop seems to encourage resource management and constant energy shifting to use every piece of resources available, but then every unused point of unused resources becomes the currency for upgrades. - The missiles aren't that powerful, which is fine. They could have been valuable tools in coverage to reach areas your guns can't reach, but then your guns have full customisation on the directions they can shoot, and whopping six sets of options available. - It has an upgrade system, but the entire thing is half-baked and poorly put together. - There is no significant or gamepl…

Finished the game on Easy, maxed out my build, got around 4 hours of playtime, but I had a blast! The visuals and audio effects are top notch, the gameplay is fun and engaging. Having to switch between attacking ground and air units is a new mechanic for me and it was a fun addition to the whole set of things you can do in this game. Don't really get the use case for "Railgun" since it's not powerful enough for me to justice it's reload time even with full energy, so I just gave up on using it. Other than that I like the limited but solid weapon choice, and the setup options. I recommend the game.

[h1] ⚖️ MATCHING EXPECTATION:[/h1] * 🟢 = Available = Fun +1 * 🔴 = Not Available = Fun -1 * Match Nothing = 0 Fun 🟢 AAA Quality Visual Effects 🟢 Cinematic Presentation + Audio 🟢 Non-Stop Dodging Thousand of Bullets 🟢 Firepower & Shield Power Management 🟢 Shooting Direction Management 🔴 Optional Slow Motion Ability 🔴 Optional Mouse Control Movement 🔴 More Grindy More Powerful 🔴 Casual Difficulty [table] [tr] [th]fMeter[/th] [th]FUN[/th] [th]fUN METER[/th] [th]DISCOUNT[/th] [th]COMMUNITY[/th] [th]REVIEWER[/th] [/tr] [tr] [th]A+[/th] [td]5[/td] [td]Loving it [/td] [td]No Wait[/td] [td] -[/td] [td] -[/td] [/tr] [tr] [th]A[/th] [td]4[/td] [td]Liked it[/td] [td]No Wait[/td] [td] -[/td] [td] -[/td] [/tr] [tr] [th]B[/th] [td]2-3[/td] [td]Half satisfied[/td] [td]Wait 50%[/td] [td] ✔[/td] [td] ✔[/td] [/tr] [tr] [th]C[/th] [td] 1[/td] [td]Less interested[/td] [td]Wait 75%[/td] [td] -[/td] [td] -[/td] [/tr]…

[b]Rating:[/b] ★★★★ - Great [b]Time Played:[/b] 3 hours [b]Difficulty:[/b] Easy \ Normal [b]Gameplay:[/b] - The energy system inverts normal shmup instinct: pickups only bank as permanent upgrade currency when your shields are already full, so playing greedy-defensive actually starves your long-term progress. Optimal play is keeping weapons maxed and topping shields off kills, and the tutorial never tells you this. - "Dual-plane" air/ground combat keeps things interesting but you can only fire one plane at a time, so ground targets often become a secondary you ignore when under fire rather than a genuine second layer except for when they're firing up at you. - Rich-get-richer economy is the core flaw: skilled runs bank more upgrade points, strugglers bank fewer, so the curve widens the skill gap instead of easing you in. - Single life on Normal+ across 15-20 minute checkpointless stages means a handful of stray bullets at a boss erases the whole run. The shield buffer softens the classic one-hit death, but no continues keep it brutal. - Missiles double as a defensive smart-bomb and also a convert to shield, so using them well is about panic-clearing walls of enemies b…

good visuals, Axelay feelings.