BIRDCAGE Demo - Hard Mode - All S Ranks

Описание: Intro: 0:00
Run starts: 2:47

There's been quite a few of these "cinematic" shmups coming out lately.

Birdcage is an upcoming shmup from development studio Polygon Bird. The game is inspired heavily by Metal Gear Solid, in both the good ways and the bad. The good is that the game has a really cool sci-fi visual style, reminiscent of a Playstation-era game. The bad is that the game also has MGS-style codec cutscenes, which can even pop up in the middle of bullet patterns. Thankfully you can choose to ignore them, but the content gods demanded that I include them in this run, which made going for S-Ranks annoying lol.

The standout mechanic of this game is a sword ala Radiant Silvergun, and the game heavily encourages you to use it. The sword does more damage than your normal spread and focus shots, and you also get way more score for killing enemies with the sword. Thankfully the sword feels really fun to use. The sword will auto-poke at enemies in a close distance, and you can also throw the sword at enemies. Lining the sword up for multiple enemy kills is real satisfying, and hitting enemies with it has a nice crunchy feeling due to the sound and particle effects. There's an element of spacing with the sword too, where you want to hit enemies with just the tip of the sword to leave yourself enough space to react to any shots they throw at you. Overall the sword rewards good routing and positioning, which is always something I love to see in a shmup.

One complaint I have is that the pacing of the game is kind of weird. I already mentioned the codecs, but aside from that the difficulty feels really sporadic. There's some long sections where there won't be much action going on, and then they'll be followed by a really hard pattern or midboss. I get that the game isn't going for pure dodging 100% of the time, but it still feels like there's some fat that can be trimmed.

I didn't fully dive into the scoring system, but from what I can tell it mostly seems to be SWORD! You get a Sword Bonus whenever you kill enemies with the sword, and sword kills will also award bonus coins. You can also get "PB Coins", which are awards for doing certain secrets during the stages such as killing enemies quickly enough or killing all of a certain enemy type with the sword. Lastly, there's a chain meter which goes up for each enemy kill, and which drains over time when you're not killing stuff. The chain timing itself is pretty lenient, and it only goes down by 1 if you drop a chain. However, the chain carries over from stage-to-stage, and it resets to 0 if you get hit, which is all pretty crazy. The chain meter is basically a no-miss check. My understanding is that your chain is multiplied against every other scoring element in the game, so if you die it's basically a reset lol. I like all of the sword stuff and the PB coins, but the chaining feels out of place in this game. As I mentioned earlier there's long sections of the game without enemies, and the chain will just pause during these sections since there'd obviously be no way to carry your chain across them.

Overall the game shows a lot of promise, and I'm looking forward to the release in November. I think if you're a fan of some older console-style shmups which mix up both classic bullet herding plus puzzle elements, and you like a cool sci-fi setting, then this will be a release to keep an eye on!

Wishlist the game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/21...