Chaos Moon : 1CC Edition

Chaos Moon is a surprisingly polished shoot em up game that doesn't mess around with its presentation, it is a call back to 90's retro arcades, no continues required. Firstly, I'm really impressed by the art direction, the pixel graphics are aesthetically pleasing to look at, the sound design is crisp even if not simple at times (not a bad thing really) and the soundtrack is a real banger too. Now lastly I'm a bit mixed about the gameplay portion, on one hand, it controls really well, buttons are easy to understand and with enough power ups, you'll turn into a weapon of mass destruction, however I feel like the punishing nature of the game alongside no continues and scarcity of one ups can be slightly frustrating when you're in the thick of it. Now despite the steep learning curve, I failed to mention that your green and purple bullets can cancel out the enemy ships if they so happen to have the corresponding colors, a neat feature that also takes some time to get used to. With that said, Chaos Moon is a neat little entry for shmup enjoyers.

The game starts with a two way plasma shot, after a couple of seconds we get a 3 way upgrade. To that point there hasn´t one single enemy appeared. Then we get a shield. It takes about 20 seconds until the first enemy approaches. For a shmup, this is a massive amount of time. Especially in a shmup that forces you to play the first stage over and over due to it´s difficulty. In typical Euro-Shmup fashion you got a weak shot and the enemy have high HP. Everything is aimed direct at you, so that you are forced to macro dodge a lot and basically avoid everything while trying to kill what you can. If you´re hit, the game doesn´t even bother to replenish your bombs, like common in shmups. The enmies don´t stop to fire when they´re in the bottom third of the screen. So the game violates against every shmup rule I know. I wonder that they didn´t add inertia to your ship. Shmups should be easy to learn, hard to master. This game is the opposite I guess. I like the sound and the clean graphics, but man is this game unenjoyable. It´s a shame, because this game had potential, but just making this game hard in a wrong way kills everything the game had going for itself.