Deathsmiles

This is a solid SCHMUP game that's very beginner friendly. The story is about some magical girls fighting against some sort of demonic force, which has warped their witchy world. The leader of this evil demonic force is some evil witches father. During the end of the game, upon defeating him, you have the chance to stay in the witchy world with your friends or return home to the real world. Basically, it's stupid, but for a videogame wherein the point is to enjoyably pass the time, it works. You have a couple moves wherein you can shoot straight, shoot backwards, a homing attack, and a satisfyingly destructive special move. The thing that sets this SCHMUP apart design wise is that it's horizontal. Which, if your a switch user like me, makes it very easy on the eyes. Speaking of looks, the presentation is fantastic. If your a fan of Puella Magi Madoka then your in luck because the game uses that same Magic Girl X Franz Ferdinand Music video, type of style, to present it's beautiful backgrounds and menacing enemy designs. Which all juxtaposes the innocent looking magic girl witches. It makes for a visually colorful collage which was fun to see. Lastly, I say it's beginner friendly because if you die then you'll simply lose your coin streak and then jump right back into the action where you left off. No game over screens, no getting sent back to the start, no obnoxiously long death animations. Just a game that prioritizes gameplay at it's core. For those reasons I think this game is perfect and I would recommend it to any casual gamer looking for something simple to turn your brain off to and have a blast as well as people who've never played a SCHMUP before, as it's relatively easy to get into.

In Deathsmiles, you pick a flying teenage female and unleash your fury on all sorts of monsters in this bullet-hell game. The game consists of several short stages which can be chosen in any order. The difficulty can be set from a choice of 3 levels before you start each stage.

In the standard game, you can shoot left with the Left Trigger and right with the Right trigger. A more powerful attack can be used which slows your character's movement which use the A/B buttons to fire left and right respectively. The Y button uses your magic bombs which clear the screen of bullets and enemies.

The reason you need to shoot left and right is because enemies can come in from all angles, so you must be constantly on guard and moving around the screen. Appropriate warnings are displayed to give you advanced notice or impending attacks so you won't get caught out if you are lingering near the edge of the screen.

Your character seems fairly big, but you only take damage if your heart gets hit with a bullet. You also have a life bar and can take at least 3 hits before using a continue. You have infinite continues though so you will always complete the game if you stick at it, but if you want a good score, you need to improve and stay alive. Each player has an accompanying familiar, a bat-like creature whose movement is the opposite of the player and can fire its own shots and block enemy bullets.

When you kill enemies, items are dropped and if you collect 1000, you can power up for extra points. When this happens, your shots are more powerful and the item counter begins to decrease although a larger frequency of items are dropped by enemies which lengthens the power up time. An added bonus is that the player does not lose life for colliding with enemies whilst powered up.

I found that a big problem with the game is that with all the bullets you are firing, all the enemies on screen, their bullets, and items dropped; the screen is extremely cluttered. I wasn't sure if the slowdown was intentional to help you dodge the bullets or if it was poor frame-rate but the game chugs along for most of the game.

The main menu is also cluttered with very similar named modes and they are virtually the same game. Essentially, you have 3 modes; Arcade/X360, Ver 1.1, and MBL. Each of these modes has 2 versions, the original arcade mode with lower resolution and more pixelated graphics, or the enhanced X360 version. Mega Black Label (MBL) has Sakura as playable character as well as the Crystal Shrine stage, and Level 999 difficulty level. In Ver 1.1 players can independently control familiars using the right stick.

Despite Deathsmiles being an enjoyable game, I completed it about 10 times before becoming bored so I'd say it doesn't offer much reason to keep playing.

Basically I just picked the character that looked like Pfil

Average completion time: 30 minutes

My thoughts

It gives you the choice of picking easy or hard levels, making it great for casual or hardcore players. That sort of thing is really uncommon in arcade shoot em ups. The game revolves around alternating between shooting left and right, as you scroll horizontally. The way the game is presented visually gives it a lot of room to show of some really atmospheric sprite backgrounds. A lot of the enemies are in pre-render 3D, so it can look a bit off at times. Overall, an incredibly stylish, spooky, and girly entry from Cave.

Recommended to

Tanbi Kei fans
Casual bullet hell fans