CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Review (PS5) – Harnessing the classic tenets of the shoot-em-up genre, CYGNI: All Guns Blazing forgoes the bells and whistles of recent games in the genre and returns to what it does best. There’s a classic charm to the gameplay in CYGNI: All Guns Blazing that I can’t help but enjoy.
Despite these solid fundamentals, I found CYGNI: All Guns Blazing to be an uneven experience that had me scratching my head and thinking that maybe this is a case where developer Keelworks was simply doing too much.
There’s a muddle of ideas that feel like they could do with a small bit of fine-tuning.
CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Review (PS5) – An Arcade Shooter In Cinematic Clothing
Blasting Off
At its core, CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is about as classic of a shoot-em-up as you could ask for. A top-down auto-scroller where you pilot a ship and defeat wave after wave of various robot foes in all sorts of formations. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it!
An informative tutorial helps to ease players back into the feel of CYGNI and it covers exactly what you need to know in a quick and easily digestible section.
In general, things are played by the book, without much room for many off-the-wall ideas, but the approach to health and power-ups is one that I can easily praise as innovative and engaging all the same.
Unlike other games in its genre, players are encouraged to prioritise whether or not they want to invest in attack or defence on the fly throughout missions. With the click of a trigger, energy can be redistributed to shields or power up your missiles.
There’s a real element of risk and reward to this system and it kept me paying attention to how many shields I had and if I could afford to sacrifice one for a barrage of powerful attacks.
Outside of the core levels, there are a suite of customisation options available to tailor your experience to your tastes. These builds are called ‘patterns’ and can be swapped as you like throughout missions at the touch of a button. Most notably, these ‘patterns’ allow you to adjust and adapt your firing patterns to suit different formations.
Options steadily unfold as you earn currency, but I did find myself being slightly confused as to what certain upgrades did. Ultimately, it didn’t massively impact my experience and only added that little bit of personability to how you choose to play.
While it’s relatively easy to earn upgrades for your ship, I was disappointed that these upgrades can’t be changed later on. Experimentation didn’t feel exactly encouraged in this system of progression.
Explosions Galore
The production quality of CYGNI is impressively robust. Animations are smooth, environments are detailed and performance never dipped beneath a smooth 60 during my time with the game.
By all accounts, it’s an impressive-looking game with some solid set-pieces as you progress through each mission.
Some of the bosses that you come across are downright stunning feats in design and animation that draw from classic science fiction inspirations. These were always worthwhile rewards for a 10-minute gauntlet.
Unfortunately, I feel like this spectacle does damage to the readability of the game as a whole. Items, enemies and – most importantly – bullets are lost in an ocean of moving particle effects and explosions that had me struggling to see where I was even moving at times, and running into things that I feel like I could have avoided.
Despite being labelled ‘normal’, I felt incredibly overwhelmed by the visual onslaught and struggled to get through even one mission, even after I had cut my teeth on the easier option.
These issues with readability are only amplified when having to split my attention between the enemies directly ahead as well as the ones on the ground below the ship.
This idea works in practice but is once again lost in the muddle of action already being thrown on the screen, I found myself having to rip my attention from one place to another on a regular basis – it didn’t feel intuitive to me.
The dedication to creating a cinematic shoot-em-up is commendable but feels like it may get in the way of giving a solid gameplay experience first and foremost, which is a slight shame. The idea of a cinematic game in this genre is uncommon but an exciting prospect, and I feel like with some refinement, it’d hit the target.
Cinematic Clashes
As mentioned just above, CYGNI goes out of its way to deliver a more story-based experience than its contemporaries, to mixed results. You control Ava, a young pilot who looks to have lost her family in armed conflict as she suits up to defeat the alien threat. Despite this intro, the story never evolves beyond an admittedly quite standard melodramatic invasion story. I was expecting something more personal and was left wanting.
Across the relatively short campaign, I never really got a sense of character or progression outside of the bare-bones foundation of aliens invading, and I was slightly disappointed by how little personality the main character has.
CYGNI was quick to draw attention to the cinematic side of proceedings and I was looking forward to seeing where the story went and if there would be any real twists. I was left feeling like I’d missed something along the way, which was sad.
That doesn’t take away from the set-pieces that you navigate, part of me just wishes that the promise of these set-pieces had been fully capitalised on for a much broader story across the board.
Arcade Adventures
After beating the short main campaign, a classic arcade mode is unlocked to sink your teeth into. This mode puts the emphasis back on the solid gameplay and lets you create a custom ship and choose the upgrades that you want without having to worry about currency.
For players who enjoy the main campaign, this arcade progression will give you a reason to come back and give the game another run. The relatively short runtime means that you can sit down to enjoy some exciting arcade action without much commitment.
That’s the ultimate paradox at the heart of CYGNI: All Guns Blazing; a solid gameplay foundation is lost under a game that seems to want to push itself into directions without fully considering the impact of what it is doing. I applaud the ambition to make a more cinematic shooter, but more of a focus needed to be given to that aspect of the game for it to not feel like unnecessary lip service to the sci-fi greats.
I had a fun enough time with CYGNI, I just wish it embraced itself as an arcade game more – it seems to want to hide the arcade roots under a very highly produced shooter.
CYGNI: All Guns Blazing will be available on PS5 on August 6, 2024.
Review code generously provided by publisher.