Kokuga

[spatular]

Is is on the 3ds eshop for £13.5. I believe it was a full release in Japan. It's a sort of shmup but a bit different. It's a g.rev game but apparently the main guy behind it is someone who worked at treasure on ikaruga and rsg.

You control a tank and can move around the level in any direction, L and R rotate the tanks turret and you can only fire one shot at a time, so aiming is quite tricky and important. I've only done the first 3 levels, then got destroyed on a boss stage. The levels are presented in a grid and it looks like you can pick any except for the boss stages which you seem to have to meet conditions to play. It's quite hard but I didn't use any ticket things so I think that might be a good idea. You have 4 tickets on the bottom screen, like repair and power ups that last a certain time, when you use them more appear, you seem to get quite a lot of them.

Also I've read it's supposed to be a coop game, and is better in coop, I'm used to playing shmups on my own so struggling to see this myself.

Not really sure what I think of it so far, it's quite fun but there's a lot of fighting with stuff that's off-screen which isnt great.

[spatular]

The more I play this the more annoying stuff I notice, but I am getting better, and keep coming back to it so it must be doing something right I guess. Probably only getting better due to heavy reliance on memorisation, some bosses/mini bosses you can't really even see what they're doing first time you fight them, the screen just doesn't show enough, like one boss fight you just see a load of laser beams flying around that killed me before I even saw the boss. The cards/power ups on the bottom screen seem terribly designed too, having to look away from the screen and take your fingers off the buttons in a shmup just seems stupid to me, and I generally want to use them when I'm in trouble so it's even worse, I've died loads trying to use the power ups. And like I mentioned before you're often firing at stuff/getting fired at by stuff that is off the screen which seems like bad design to me.

I've finished most of the main missions on normal mode, still not done any of the three final missions yet, got to the boss on 2 of them. There's loads of harder difficulty modes too. But when it's good, dodging stuff while rotating the turret to precicely take out the baddies can be really good fun.

[spatular]

Did the three final levels today, two of them seemed a bit lucky and the other was really easy, oddly. There's still loads of difficulty modes totry but I'm not sure I will try, due to problems mentioned above. Also I don't really understand the games structure, when you start off you have to do one level -choosing any except the final ones, then you can only choose one next to the one you did first, and if you do one of the final levels it boots you back to the main menu after playing the credits. Not sure what's going on there.