The Battle of Aurinoxia

The Battle of Aurinoxia is a short game. On the default setting, you can finish it in about 30-35 minutes. They do offer some extra modes to extend your experience, but none of them is worth mentioning. You’ll get your worth in that half-hour and move on to something else. Shooter fans won’t feel much of a challenge, but for the casual enjoyer, this is a fine distraction.

Shoot 'em up and blow them up. Great soundtrack, great visuals, and a lot of bullet packed action. I am not an expert in this genre but this was a ton of fun and could see myself trying to work through the whole game and then possibly trying the harder difficulties. I recommend this if you are even slightly interested in this genre.

Not even fun in a "so bad it's good" way. It's just... bad. Enemies sometimes spawn from behind you, which is frustrating and feels like cheap design. The enemy patterns are laughably lazy. Most of the time they just fire a straight wall of bullets and stop, so the "strategy" becomes waiting it out, shooting a bit, and going back to a corner. There's no flow, no rhythm, no intensity. All the things that make SHMUPs great are just missing. Worse yet, there's zero originality here. The game doesn't try to bring anything new, and even the basics are poorly done. It feels like someone copied a SHMUP template, tweaked a few things, and called it a day. Visually, it's just as uninspired. The art is bland and forgettable, and even retro shooters from 20 or 30 years ago have more style and personality than this. There's no visual identity, nothing that makes the game stand out or even look particularly finished. The soundtrack is probably the only part I can say is halfway decent. A few synth tracks are kind of cool, but everything else falls apart fast. The sound design is rough, especially the boss voiceovers. They're so awful that I ended up muting the entire game just to keep going…

The main mode is Story, which doesn’t actually have much of a story and doesn’t go beyond the premise of a lone protector fighting against a massive invading force. Still, it gives you the feeling that you’re just one pilot in a larger conflict, and friendly units will occasionally appear to help you for a few seconds. Then there’s Stage Select, although you first have to beat a stage in Story mode to unlock it, and Survival mode, where you face random enemy waves and bosses. All modes let you choose between five difficulty settings, which affect enemy strength and the frequency of power-ups. The power-up you’ll see most often, and the most important one, upgrades your main gun. Unlike most games where a weapon can only be upgraded a few times before additional power-ups become useless and merely increase your score, here you can continue boosting your firepower many times. It starts with basic forward fire, then gains additional shots in all four directions, eventually expanding to include diagonal fire as well. Your firepower carries over between stages, so staying alive is important. Even so, you can quickly recover some of it after dying because your ship drops a few power-u…

Let's start with the positive parts. A lot of effort went into the graphcs ans music, the game looks very polished and bullets are very visible. The soundtrack gets a lot of european composers vibes, and it sounds fantastic, making the game look and sound great. The control is responsive, and the devs correctly avoided getting into the common pitfall of adding inertia to the ship - thumbs up for that. However, at it's core, the game is supposed to work as as shmup and that's where it doesn't click. All enemies are like sponges, they absorb a lot of shoots before giving up - even the puniest of enemies. And no matter how powered up you are, you still have to shoot a lot on them and the power up is almost pointless. The mine fields in the game lack any strategy - they explose at random and the blast range is exxagerated. Would have been cooler to have a chain reaction to help clear out the screen, or award some bonus from navigating through them. And talking about navigating, the game is more like a traditional methodic shmup that tries to behave like a bullet hell by filling the screen with bullets. But without the careful consideration of the genre, so that the hitbox is huge…

Very fun! I dig it 👍