Cygni: All Guns Blazing Review – A Thoughtful Rejection of the Arcade Shooter Rulebook

Arcade shooters are, in truth, a matter of fragility. Despite their reputation as the most furious and excessive form of gaming, they almost universally put you in command of a weak armada; a vessel that disintegrates after the briefest contact with a single enemy bullet.

That’s not the case with Cygni: All Guns Blazing, a new shooter that insists that it’s okay to take dozens of enemy shots and stay in the game. It might seem like a reckless inversion of what makes the genre so special and rewarding. However, Scottish developer KeelWorks seems to have been meticulous in its subtle shakeup of what a shooter can be and who it’s for. There’s even an argument to be made that Cygni offers a vision of what a successful shooter could be; namely incredibly polished, technically muscular, and capable of welcoming and impressing a wide, mainstream audience.

Cygni is delightful, dazzling, and probably divisive. Take your first foray into the main campaign mode and you’ll find it unusually full of cutscenes. Big, cinematic, detailed cutscenes that lend a thunderous energy to the game compared to the short animated intros or traditional arcade attraction screens that most shooters tend to stick to, but their quality helps Cygni establish its blockbuster aspirations and appeal. They’re also, thankfully, completely skippable, something that’s crucial in a genre that encourages fans to revisit.

Thankfully, the quality of these interstitial scenes extends to the main game as well. When you first launch into the opening level, you can peer into a city so bristling with detail that every part of it feels like a living place. And from then on, everything from the backgrounds to the enemy designs to the soundscape and explosion effects is meticulously crafted, forcefully setting the tone of a desperate battle as society is overwhelmed and on edge by the coming war. The detail is so evocative, in fact, that it’s like watching a real-life diorama scene. As you dance with your rivals high in the skies, you’ll even see swarms of tiny foot soldiers and vehicles below going to war with equally tiny alien invaders.

KeelWorks’ creation is done in a “vertizontal” style, which means it scrolls vertically across a horizontally oriented playing field. This wider presentation not only gives it more cinematic energy, but also provides a much larger area to move around and control. Thankfully, you’re armed with a weapon that can be aimed far to the left or right via dual-stick inputs, increasing cover and giving less experienced players the ability to take down enemies without walking directly under their torrent of firepower.

For genre veterans, meanwhile, it opens up new strategies to explore, albeit at the cost of arcade stick compatibility. With homing missiles enabled, you’ll even find yourself moving around larger enemies in many stages, unleashing ammo in multiple directions. Your second weapon, meanwhile, takes the form of a laser that targets enemies on the ground below, reminiscent of early Xevious scrolling shooters and even the mighty Rayforce series. Being able to toggle between the locked-on state of both weapons allows you to switch between more powerful and more direct firepower.

Between stages, you can upgrade your weapons and design different custom firepower configurations that can be changed on the fly in-game. This is handy, since you start with a somewhat underpowered peashooter. But you soon realize that this is a game about beating the seven stages and then returning again and again with your newly upgraded abilities, asserting greater dominance and the thrill of playing with a boost. Alas, the upgrade shop doesn’t explain much about what it offers, and weapon customization feels impossible to grasp during your first time with Cygni.

Here, by genre standards, the seven levels are long, lasting between 10 and 15 minutes each, sometimes longer. Compared to the convention of a 30-minute, five-level arcade shooter, that's significant. But then again, Cygni isn't about to be held back by convention. This isn't a shooter that encourages you to rush to the conclusion, hammering through each level one after the other. It wants you to take your time absorbing its world. Once you've reached the end, most of your time will be spent drilling through individual levels as separate entities, rather than tackling the game en masse. With that in mind, the extended level lengths make sense, though they'll certainly drag for genre veterans.

More significantly, there’s an elegance to the core gameplay system that supports high-level play while recognizing that most players will simply want an exhilarating ride. It’s still no cakewalk, but instead of lives, you’re granted a generous shield that can withstand five hits. Many downed enemies yield a single power-up that can be picked up to give your shield an extra unit of protection. Press a button and the shield unit is reassigned to your weapons, allowing you to power up, unleash expendable rockets, or continue the fight with multiple weapon arrays. Those power-up units can be moved back to your shield as needed. And if your shield is full, those same power-ups stack up as in-game currency that can be spent on upgrades during downtime between stages.

Overall, power-ups tend to rain down in large numbers, meaning you can often charge through a barrage of bullets taking hits, and then collect enough to immediately recover. As such, Cygni is very much a game of on-the-fly resource management as much as it is intentionally precise bullet dodging. This is especially true on the easiest difficulty setting. Crank up the intensity and, while you can still take a fair amount of hits, juggling resources back and forth between your shield and weapons becomes an all-encompassing strategic objective.

For veterans of the genre, there are still plenty of sections that curb the flow of power-ups and instead ask you to carefully dodge every single bullet. In fact, there could be a good number of these sections more, especially on the easy mode. On the hard side of things, the difficulty is atrocious and the ability to absorb damage is more limited. In fact, its most challenging mode arguably sits closest to the genre’s existing conventions, yet Cygni is at its best when it leans into what makes it different.

That’s why Cygni will likely still cause a rift among some players. Shifting its focus away from bullet dodging will seem sacrilegious to many. If you’re an arcade game fanatic, you might also feel that Cygni’s bullet-sponge ship trivializes and undermines the entire purpose of the game; like a driving game that does most of the steering for you. Likewise, that same group might feel that the long stages replace short, pristine sections with a bit too much repetition and drawn-out battles that feel more like a war of attrition.

The score, meanwhile, isn't particularly good at encouraging high-risk or otherwise daring play. It rewards taking down multiple enemies one after another, and even chains of those combos; however, with so many enemies it's hard not to constantly take down targets, leaving the score feeling a bit disconnected from the way enemies and projectiles land on screen. Additionally, projectile visibility is far from perfect, with bullets all too often getting lost amidst the cocktail of explosions and particle effects. And while the cutscenes bring so much quality, the narrative elements are a bit familiar and rather lacking in depth.

If you’re all for a battle of wits with an elaborate, spiraling scoring system that plays out in one short, uninterrupted bout, Cygni might not be for you. That said, its successes with broad appeal are clearly evident in local co-op, where veterans and newcomers alike can share a meaningful experience together, even contributing to a shared score that allows both players’ efforts to fuel combos. It might be the game’s best mode.

Ultimately, this isn't a cynical dilution of the established shooter formula. Instead, the team has approached it from a rather different angle, resulting in a visually brilliant, technically ambitious, and highly engaging shooter that doesn't require you to be a genre devotee to enjoy it. And that might be exactly what a successful shooter game should look like.

Konami provided a copy of Cygni: All Guns Blazing for review.