Hell Blasters

Hell Blasters is a lot better than it looks, and I do mean that as a compliment. Beneath it's simple graphics lies one of the most technically competent and beginner friendly shmups that's come around since Raging Blasters a year ago. It was developed by an extremely accomplished shmup player who knows what makes a good shooting game and incorporated much of his favorite elements into the design.

The Story Mode is also a training mode in disguise, and one of the most innovative aspects of the game. It breaks down each level into small segments along with the bosses, letting you train and practice each section independently, advancing the story as you go. It even adds metal gear style training missions prior to each new level, showcasing the new enemies you will be dealing with and how to best approach them. A really brilliant idea I would love to see in more shmups as it makes the game accessible to a wide range of players and skill levels. And once you are ready, the Arcade mode puts it all together into a single experience without any breaks. Four different skill levels are included, with the easiest being called Journalist haha, clearly for anyone who wants to breeze through the game to see what it has to offer.

It also has a fantastic scoring and chaining system with a lot of depth for more advanced players, along with a dedicated 3min Score Attack mode for fans of Caravan style levels to practice and compete in.

I recently previewed this game in-depth in my New Games 2021 video on my youtube channel, which you could check out if you want to see a lot more of this cool game and what I though of it in video form. I go into the bullet clearing mechanic and more of the actual gameplay. You can jump to time code 12:44 if you want to jump right to Hell Blasters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZXam10cNUY

It may not be flashy visually, but it has fun 8bit style chip tunes, charming cut scenes with over a dozen unique endings to uncover, and is just an extremely well put together experience for novices and experts alike. Anyone giving it a chance will be pleasantly surprised with how much it has to offer.

This is the Bluesmobile of shmups. It may not look like much on the outside, but it's got the cop motor, cop tires, and probably even the cig lighter. Great level design & bullet patterns, a ton of modes, leader board & replays, great shmup tunes, it's all there. Great work, devs!

The sprites and music are what you see and hear in the trailer. Not very good imo but still passable perhaps.

However, the stage design is very plain.
Certain enemy types get reused extremely often throughout all stages and their bullet patterns are rather generic.
There's no proper flow throughout most of the stages. Instead, most stage gameplay consists of waves of enemies that appear in specified intervals. However, the intervals are often so great that destroying all enemies of one wave immediately may result in a lot of downtime until the next wave appears, rather than spawning additional enemies. I understand that that's most likely designed around forcing you to keep certain waves alive longer so the chain doesn't break but I'm sure that could've been solved much better. Ultimately, I did not enjoy trying to memorize this game as most of it isn't very memorable.

The characters are not well balanced. Winter (the woman) is rather underpowered while Summer (the man) is very overpowered. The leaderboard does not seem to have a filter for characters.

On the positive side, the game has a practice mode, a story mode with tutorials and an instant restart feature.