Kicking off the releases of this very hot month of August 2024 is CYGNI All Guns Blazing, the first work from the software house called KellWorks which can boast Konami as publisher. After spending quite a few hours slaughtering aliens aboard a spaceship over the last few weeks, we are finally ready to give you a definitive judgment on a title that only partially keeps the promises made at the time of the announcement. Let’s not waste any more time and go and discover a game that tries to bring vertical scrolling shooters back into fashion.
Aliens, aliens everywhere
After an arcade cabinet-style tutorial, complete with CRT filter, the single player campaign of CYGNI All Guns Blazing immediately begins. The protagonist, a skilled pilot, suddenly finds herself having to face an unexpected threat: the humans who live on the planet Cygni, in fact, end up under attack by biomechanical alien creatures that seem to have awakened from a long sleep, with every intention of wiping out those who have invaded their celestial body.
We see the young girl jumping on her ship and, after a short flight, getting ready to fight, with a truly spectacular transition to the gameplay phase. Given the premise, we hoped that the entire adventure would be studded with moments of this type, but unfortunately this is not the case. With the exception of the introductory sequence, everything that will happen in the subsequent phases of the short campaign of CYGNI All Guns Blazing will never propose anything similar again and the cutscenes will be less engaging and refined.
However, it is truly incredible how the game somehow manages to communicate with the player through gameplay. Although the cinematics are quite disappointing and the plot is nothing more than a banal pretext to have us eliminate hundreds of aliens with lasers, it must be said that the staging has managed to convince us. Sometimes you notice events on the backgrounds such as the advance of the enemy or the actions of our allies. Also thanks to the excellent sense of depth given by the settings, we can almost always notice something important in the distance, such as the movement of hundreds of troops with which we can sometimes even interact.
CYGNI All Guns Blazing also includes a button to hit targets that touch the ground, but in this case the lock-on happens automatically and with the analog stick you simply have to switch from one target to another. On paper, this is an interesting option, however in reality we are faced with a very marginal gameplay mechanic, which in most cases can be completely avoided.
The occasions in which you find yourself having to attack someone who is on the ground can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
An atypical shoot’em up
Putting aside the issue of air-to-ground attacks, let’s move on to the “real” gameplay of CYGNI All Guns Blazing. The KeelWorks title is a vertical scrolling shooter, which includes typical elements of twin stick shooters and almost completely lacks bullet hell situations.
The only way to survive is to jump into the fray: in CYGNI you have to take out enemies and collect from their remains the consumables that restore the ‘health’ of the aircraft. Basically, in the KeelWorks game it would be unthinkable to stay on the defensive or try to dodge the bullets. The only exception concerns the spectacular boss fights with gargantuan mechanical monstrosities equipped with tentacles, turrets and other toys with which they will try to put a spoke in our wheels. In these circumstances, the game becomes more similar to bullet hell, since there are no enemies to eliminate to recover the shields and the amount of lasers and bullets on the screen is smaller, so the player can try to avoid them all to stay alive.
What makes CYGNI different from its peers, however, is the way it shoots and moves. The ship is damn fast and the fire, which can also be automatic for convenience, does not necessarily have to be directed at whoever is in front of us: with the help of the right analog stick it is possible to direct it with a maximum angle of about 45° to the right and the same to the left. This system makes it possible to annihilate threats even when they are not in a straight line and is especially useful against bosses, many of which shoot laser beams that can thus be avoided while continuing to inflict damage on their weak point.
To tell the truth, there are also other gameplay elements that make the game even more complex and that must necessarily be used in order to survive the alien invasion. One above all is the management of energy, since with the simple press of two buttons we can direct it towards shields or cannons, in order to increase the offensive or defensive power of the ship depending on the need. Then there are the classic missiles and a series of gadgets that must be unlocked between one mission and another in the appropriate screen.
While conceptually very interesting, the upgrade system in CYGNI All Guns Blazing is quite questionable due to a menu that is too confusing. We appreciated the ability to change the way the guns fire and take to the field with multiple interchangeable configurations ‘on-the-go’, but the way in which this is achieved needs reconsidering, especially when using a controller. This is a problem that extends to the user interface as well, which is difficult to understand and does not help at all to understand what is happening, especially when you consider the chaos on the screen.
Arcade and Co-op Modes
Among the negative aspects of CYGNI All Guns Blazing we also find the longevity, given that this vertical scrolling shooter has a rather short duration.
The seven missions that make up the adventure require between ten and fifteen minutes to complete: in short, in an hour and a half you will have reached the end credits. The problem is that, given how the game is set up, the user is not encouraged to replay the missions over and over again. One of the causes is to be found in the level of challenge, which we found to be truly senseless for a product that will hit the market in 2024 and that should also allow those who are less familiar with shmups to have fun. The lowest difficulty is the only one with two extra lives, but it could still be complex for those approaching the genre for the first time. It would have made much more sense to allow, at least in the campaign, to customize the gaming experience as happens in many other products nowadays.
After all, there is the Arcade mode, which is aimed at expert players who want to climb the rankings, with a unique difficulty level and zero chance of making mistakes: death implies game over, forcing the player to start the story over again. We found the choice to unlock all the power-ups for those who dedicate themselves to this game mode quite bizarre: if on the one hand it makes perfect sense to put everyone on the same level, on the other it makes it almost useless to dedicate yourself to farming in the campaign to unlock power-ups, also considering the small amount of points that are obtained for each completed mission.
Unfortunately, Arcade mode is the only real extra, if we can call it that. The content offering ends here, with the sole exception of split-screen co-op, which, exclusively locally, allows a second player to grab a pad and join the battle.
Graphics and options
Although CYGNI All Guns Blazing is not a particularly demanding product in terms of requirements, perhaps also due to the use of the now ‘old’ Unreal Engine 4 (as confirmed by the developers recently on the FAQ of the official website), it should be highlighted that it lacks a series of options that are now fundamental for any title arriving on PC.
In addition to not enjoying support for Nvidia’s DLSS or other equivalent technologies such as AMD’s FSR, CYGNI All Guns Blazing completely lacks any graphics settings that would allow you to customize the visual aspect in order to adapt it to the performance of your machine. Aside from changing the anti-aliasing, all we can do is alternate the various quality presets, without being able to maintain high texture detail and give up the splendid particle and volumetric effects, which despite their visual quality affect the fluidity. During our test, which took place on both PC and PlayStation 5, we noticed some uncertainty in the framerate, especially in the most hectic moments. Let’s be clear, these problems do not affect the gaming experience that much and it is unlikely that they will cause game over, but it is also true that we would have liked them not to be present at all in both versions tested. Speaking of visual quality, we have no particular criticisms to make. The visual impact is remarkable in the vast majority of cases, given that we often find ourselves faced with suggestive scenarios with a non-negligible quantity of details.
The only shame is that the artistic direction is not always impeccable, since we found the aesthetics of the creatures to be inconsistent, and they reminded us a lot of those seen in War of the Worlds. The bosses are splendid, and even some of the biomechanical aliens that resemble enormous flying dolphins, but many other enemies instead propose a rather generic design.
