Despite a very public declaration of a move away from video games and into the pachinko/slot machine market, Konami finds itself slowly coming back at a smaller scale to the market that made it a household name among gamers. Aside from its various retro compilations, the company has been dabbling with new entries in its Bomberman and Contra series as well as newer, smaller projects like Bail or Jail and Super Crazy Rhythm Castle. Cygni: All Guns Blazing represents the company coming back to the shoot-'em-up genre, one that it was well versed in before with the likes of Axelay, the Parodius series, and the ever-popular Gradius series.

As far as the story goes, you're a pilot of the military forces of the planet Cygni, one of the places colonized by humans after leaving Earth. On this day, alien forces have attacked, and you use your ship to mount a counterattack. Again, it's standard stuff for any shooter, but something to note here is the presence of cut scenes that are fully animated for the first and final levels of the game — but illustrations with voice-overs for the levels in between.

The presence of cut scenes shows that the game wants to focus on its story, but it also acts as foreshadowing of what to expect. You start with a cut scene with an upbeat rock song playing in the background as you prep for a flight with your ship. Each scene bounces from mournful losses to being ultra patriotic calls to action to providing background as to how the battles came about, but you get the sense that the game is aiming for everything it can instead of sticking to one emotion for the tale.

The gameplay feels like a mash-up of ideas brought over from other shooting games. Cygni is a top-down, vertical scrolling, bullet hell shooter with twin-stick elements; you use the right analog stick to aim your guns while also pulling R2 to fire. However, R2 only takes care of airborne enemies, as L2 has you firing against ground enemies. You have no screen-clearing bomb, but you have a volley of missiles if you have the ammo. You don't die in one hit, but you have a shield system to protect you from multiple hits before you finally explode. Finishing levels with a high enough score gives you points to upgrade your ship between levels with things like different bullet spreads, extra firing drones, more missiles to throw out, and even special weapons, like a powerful energy beam and a larger explosion that sacrifices your shield power to activate.

Like the cut scenes, the gameplay mechanics can be seen as scattershot; the whole game never fully commits to the expectations of a particular well-known mechanic. For example, the twin-stick shooting is fairly limited because you can only pivot your gun 45 degrees in either direction, so that will disappoint anyone expecting full 360-degree coverage based upon the term "twin-stick." The separation of ground and air shooting is a neat idea that hasn't been en vogue in shooters for a while, but the inability to do both simultaneously is a big miss. There are too many enemies in the sky for ground attacks to be effective, as you'll rarely have time to concentrate on those, and it feels like a big mistake to have this occur when games as old as Xevious and its imitators let you do simultaneous shooting decades ago.

The upgrade system is a good idea, but the menu's text is far too small to be legible at living room distances. The lack of a visual indicator for main gun and drone gun shooting patterns means that buying those upgrades is a gamble, and creating combinations means having to go into a level to see if they're to your liking. The load times for the game may be quick, but when other bullet hell shooters go out of their way to show you the exact shooting patterns of various ships, this move feels like a mistake that could easily be rectified.

When it comes to the bullet hell shooting, Cygni seems to commit a number of mistakes that affect battlefield readability. Enemy projectiles are never consistent in size, but some are so small that they look like sparks. You'll only realize that they're harmful when you collide with them and they register as hits against you. The colors of projectiles that you and enemies produce are always different from one another, but that can sometimes lead to them matching in color. A good example of this is that some homing shots take on the same color as most enemy shots coming toward you. The color mixing also means that some projectiles blend in with explosions and background elements, depending on the lighting at that moment. There's also the fact that your missiles are rarely seen on-screen, so you may never realize that you've fired something until you look at your HUD and see that your missile stock has been reduced by one.

Then there's the issue of game pacing. Of the seven levels, the first ends up being the longest one, with three bosses to fight and a speed that feels glacial. Combined with the fact that the normal difficulty gives you a plethora of bullets to deal with and only one life, it feels like the game wants to quickly throw you into the deep end. You can change the difficulty to easy to mitigate this; you can change difficulty at any time and still carry over any ship upgrades. By doing this, you'll notice that later levels are actually shorter and only contain one boss each. Things ramp up again when you reach the final level, but that's expected. In short, the experience feels rather lopsided to the point where those unwilling to move to the easy difficulty level will simply be stuck in the first third of the first level for a very long time.

All of the things mentioned above would render any other shooter almost unplayable, but Cygni barely escapes that designation due to the fact that the action is good. The game has tons of enemies to kill, per bullet hell tradition, but everyone is good about firing at you instead of rushing in to become cannon fodder. You will get hit a great deal, but pick-ups mean more than points, since they also refill your shield. You can allocate shield points into missile points and vice versa. The shield system and sometimes-constant stream of pick-ups mean that there are moments when you can afford to be reckless. This is refreshing in a bullet hell game, but the game does a good job of reining that in with boss fights that are large in scope and patterns that are tricky to recognize and avoid. You may even power through some of the design mistakes to reach the end of the game.

The game features co-op play, which is nice to see considering that the feature isn't always a given in the genre nowadays. There's no online version of the mode, but the local version supports two players. The presence of extra firepower is always welcome, and enemy scaling isn't necessary, since the various difficulty levels provide enough enemies to work with. One of the more interesting elements is the upgrade system. Both players share the point pool for upgrades, which makes it more difficult to avoid an imbalance of power in co-op play. However, if you're playing solo, you can still place upgrades on player two's ship, so you can help your partner catch up to your level when they aren't present, if you feel so inclined.

Finishing the campaign on any difficulty unlocks an Arcade mode that has its own distinct traits. You start with nine upgrade points, and you're free to choose which upgrades you want, but you lose the ability to add even more upgrades during your run. You can also create your own shooting patterns, as you can incrementally modify the rotations of every gun. While it is more readable than the presets, it still isn't as good as a system where you can see the firing pattern in action.

When it comes to the gameplay, Cygni throws you into the campaign's normal difficulty, so you only have one life. However, all continues are also gone, so it's more of a survival mode; there's no way to earn any continues. Co-op is completely removed, so this is a purely solo affair, but you have a dedicated leaderboard, which the campaign didn't have. Overall, it's a nice unlock if you've already learned all of the nuances.

The game uses Unreal Engine, which comes with some benefits rarely seen in this genre. This is especially notable in the explosions and other particle effects, like the shifting ground when a particular boss emerges, all of which look absolutely stunning in motion. The game packs in a multitude of enemies and bullets while also maintaining 60fps. All of the enemies are able to sport minute details that you'll only catch if you pause the game, but their presence shows off what the engine can do. Perhaps one of the more interesting parts is that the game tries its hardest to use a more varied color palette during battle, partially invalidating the criticisms of everything being gray and dull with Unreal Engine.

With the various visual benefits come some performance issues. The frame rate starts to buckle when the screen becomes flooded with too many enemies, and while the drop isn't so low that the game feels unplayable, you will notice the slowdown from the usually solid 60fps. More pressing are the times when the game stops to load in something new. They don't happen often, and they usually occur during the few lulls in combat, but the game consistently pauses in almost the same spots per level. It's more than annoying, as the pauses can briefly take you out of the game; this is highly undesirable in a genre that demands focus and attention when things begin to heat up.

Compared to the graphics, the audio is almost flawless. The soundtrack tries to hit a plethora of emotions from bombast to melancholy and everything in between, but they still fit perfectly in the context of shooting up almost endless waves of enemies. All of the songs sport a definitive ending when you take out a boss as opposed to fading away from a loop. It provides a feeling of finality after each battle the process. The effects hit hard with a great amount of bass punctuating each explosion. This  is especially true when you destroy large enemies and start to get some big booms that rattle furniture if your system is good enough. The voice work is fine and limited to cut scenes, but you'll hear so little of it that it's forgettable enough.

Cygni: All Guns Blazing is a "jack of all trades" type of shooter. It isn't afraid to use as many different gameplay mechanics as possible, and it isn't fearful of creating chaotic situations almost all of the time. You'll wish that more time had been spent refining these elements or adding some quality-of-life elements and tweaks to make the mix stand out more positively. What's available is good enough that hardcore shooting fans will enjoy it, and the hope is that improvements are made to tighten up the experience either through various patches or a potential sequel.

Score: 6.5/10