CYGNI: All Guns Blazing (PlayStation 5) review "Eternally Retold"

A planet under attack. An army of advanced beings of unclear origins. A lone female fighter pilot, in a highly-advanced ship, sent out to save the world.

It's heartwarming to know that, after several decades of sci-fi shoot'em ups, the exact same plot line is still used in newer games.

Made by Scotland's KeelWorks in their first foray into video games, with publishing duties handled by Konami, 2024's Cygni: All Guns Blazing is a top-down vertical-scrolling shoot'em up with 3D graphics. The visuals are demonstrated immediately in the first stage, with your yellow, wasp-like ship flying over a trendy city and fending off a force of mechanical airborne opponents flooding the screen. It literally looks like a fireworks show with all the flashy explosions and bullets on display. If you've previously played a shoot'em up, then you know what this entails: the screen fills with scripted formations and "seekers" that track your aircraft, both of which love to litter the screen with projectiles.

Shoot'em ups are not for everyone, as, especially for bullet hell shooters, they require an intense concentration of eye-hand coordination when dodging bullets and shooting specific targets concurrently. Sometimes this can go on nonstop for a minute, or five minutes, or the entire stage. Cygni continues this oh-so wonderful tradition across seven stages, where you traverse areas hovering over ruined buildings, speeding across the sea, and through a facility in orbit. And as with any well-structured shooter, you'll likely get destroyed within the first few stages while figuring out the flow. You're probably thinking you can simply respawn from your death and continue the fight.

But then reality quickly sets in as you're only given a single life to complete each stage. Though, that isn't as overbearing as it sounds, since you're sent back to a selection menu after finishing a stage.



However, surviving on a single life is still a challenge, since the devs have designed stages to literally clutter with enemies and bullets; this game is structured in such a way that being hit by something, every few seconds, just happens on default difficulty. The stage two opener is a prime example of this: as you emerge from a narrow passage, an army of oval legged robots—looking like the sentry turrets from Portal—greet you from both sides with projectiles. You try your best to weave and annihilate, but they're immediately replaced with more robots. This section goes on for nearly two minutes. No matter how good you are, your ship's getting hit.

Thankfully, the devs aren't masochists, as the game's overbearing nature feels that way because of how your ship's vitality is conducted compared to other shoot'em ups. You are supplemented with two gauges at the beginning of every stage, each with six filled bars. The orange bars are the strength of your projectile attacks, with six maxed bars being the strongest, and the blue bars are your shield strength, indicating how many times your ship can take a beating. Enemies occasionally drop health items that replenish a shield bar per pick up, but the drop rate isn't a big enough comfort zone when you're consistently getting hurt.


Note: you can turn off the screen shake.

As enemies chip away at your blue bars, there's only one thing left to do as death comes close: take power away from your attack gauge. Cygni's central gimmick involves siphoning energy between the two gauges in order to survive. The battlefield becomes more reasonable to get through once you embrace this concept; but don't think this will now be a breeze, because getting through a stage is still a fight. Obviously, the catch with this gimmick is that, when you siphon, you are lowering firepower, meaning stronger enemies or groups will take slightly longer to destroy. The urgency to fill your shield, but then quickly manually refill your attack power when it becomes "safe" is ever present.

Understandably, Arcade Mode can only be unlocked after beating the main mode; having to survive all stages, now without breaks, with just one life, under the game's in-your-face design, is quite the undertaking. Aside from getting a high score in Arcade's online leaderboards, replay value also comes in the form of customizing your ship with differing fire spreads and such. Though, the biggest frustration comes with the in-depth Designer Mode selection, which offers no explanation for what some of its features do in-game. KeelWorks has stated they intend to patch in descriptions, but as of this writing you currently have to go to their YouTube page and watch a video for proper explanations. They chalk it up to development time restraints, but the lack of even basic clarifications is still a bizarre oversight.



Is Cygni unique? Even though it has a neat gimmick, it's a bullet hell shooter that slightly tinkers with the archetype. That's not a knock against it, as the game is a mostly competently-made shooter; it's just that, gameplay-wise, it doesn't do anything very creative outside its siphon shtick, which becomes noticeable in later stages when scenarios are repeated. The intense engagement is still a thing, but there's more the devs could've done in terms of stage variety. However, if the concept of literally surviving a barrage of bullets intrigues you, then the game will deliver an interesting thrill in that aspect. Play the tutorial for the basics, fiddle with the options menu, go in with tempered expectations, and Cygni: All Guns Blazing will indulge your trigger fingers for a few hours.

Community review by dementedhut (November 10, 2024) Bought Squirrel with a Gun in November, played and completed in November, collected all the trophies in November, and submitted a review for it in November. I guess I failed the challenge.