GanaBlade
released on Aug 19, 2023
This is a hot barrage shooting game. Destroy enemy planes with powerful firepower, shuttle and evade in the barrage. Various scenes with rich colors Planets, Fire Stars, Jupiter Stars, Water Stars, and huge battleships. It's time to drive a space fighter and show your strength! !
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Solid shmup with interesting stages and enemy patterns.
A little lacky in boss fights and ship variety
A little lacky in boss fights and ship variety
Cool game! 1cc hard and review in description
https://youtu.be/FLOIO2ieg1M
https://youtu.be/FLOIO2ieg1M
Really liked this Shmup. Plays frenetically like Compile of the past with some great bosses.
Now this is more like it. GanaBlade is a recently released, unfortunately overlooked shmup on Steam that has fun weapons, great stages and a good variety of miniboss and boss fights throughout. The last stage especially goes hard and was a highlight for me. There's also an upgrade shop between stages that actually feels like it doesn't bog down the gameplay, which is always nice to see.
You can tell that the developer applied their shmup inspirations to good effect here, if anything a bit too well since GanaBlade has a bit of an identity crisis. Although the impression you may get from the visuals and trailer is that this is a Compile/Aleste styled shmup, most of the game feels like a much more modern bullet hell. I spotted more references to CAVE shmups than anything from Compile here and the dense, bullet hell patterns coupled with not having focused movement and your ship's hitbox being fairly large leads to some moments of frustration.
That said, although the two highest difficulties (ex and exretro modes) offer a decent challenge, GanaBlade isn't a particularly hard 1cc due to the generous regenerating auto-bomb. Ultimately, I was hoping for more setpiece-driven design such as the fire columns that appear in stage 3, but you're going to spending most of the run just dodging dense bullet patterns that don't stand out as much from the crowd of all the other indie developed danmaku shooters out there.
While GanaBlade isn't quite as laser-focused and refined as something like GG Aleste 3, this shmup is still a good time and more people should check it out. :)
You can tell that the developer applied their shmup inspirations to good effect here, if anything a bit too well since GanaBlade has a bit of an identity crisis. Although the impression you may get from the visuals and trailer is that this is a Compile/Aleste styled shmup, most of the game feels like a much more modern bullet hell. I spotted more references to CAVE shmups than anything from Compile here and the dense, bullet hell patterns coupled with not having focused movement and your ship's hitbox being fairly large leads to some moments of frustration.
That said, although the two highest difficulties (ex and exretro modes) offer a decent challenge, GanaBlade isn't a particularly hard 1cc due to the generous regenerating auto-bomb. Ultimately, I was hoping for more setpiece-driven design such as the fire columns that appear in stage 3, but you're going to spending most of the run just dodging dense bullet patterns that don't stand out as much from the crowd of all the other indie developed danmaku shooters out there.
While GanaBlade isn't quite as laser-focused and refined as something like GG Aleste 3, this shmup is still a good time and more people should check it out. :)