CYGNI: All Guns Blazing – PS5 Review

CYGNI is a vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up that comes to us by way of Scottish studio KeelWorks and famed publisher Konami who have surprised us somewhat by putting out an original IP.

The game has had quite the media push over the last few months with it landing on the official PlayStation blog (and Twitter) thanks, in part, to some sublime looking presentation.   This isn’t your usual 16-bit shooter that we’ve become accustomed to on PSN.  Instead it’s got the look and feel of something a lot more premium.

Set in the future, the game sees you playing as a pilot who has to defend the colony world, the titular Cygni, from a race of biomechanical alien bastards.  And you get a decent amount of high quality cutscenes to sell the story.  That said, it’s maybe not the most interesting tale and eventually we found it hard to keep interested.  This is a shoot ’em up after all.  But full marks to KeelWorks for trying to inject some cinematic storytelling into the game.

You’ll want to look into the tutorial before you start.  It’s presented in an Alien (the movie) style retro-futuristic style, all green and black screens and it explains the basics of combat.  However, you’ll soon discover that the game is far from basic.

You’ve got two main weapon types.  Your forward firing gun (which can be tilted using the right analog stick) and your air-to-ground weapon.  It’s a bit like any number of 1980s coin ops in that respect, think Xevious or Flying Shark.  But then you’ve also got an energy system to think about which lets you divert power to your shields or your weapons, letting you tweak attack and defence on the fly.

This is compounded with an optional auto-aiming firing mode and also an auto-firing one (which you’ll have to map to the DualSense yourself as the default control layout is absolutely crammed with other functions).  And you have a limited number of missiles too.  Eesh, that’s a lot to think about.  But that’s not even the end of it as there’s a whole upgrade system to get to grips with too.

But at first you’ll have no credits to upgrade with and so you’ll want to get into the action, which at this point is as simple as the game will be before you start adding rotary shield upgrades and whatever else.

The core gameplay is a little hard to place in terms of what kind of shoot ’em up it is.  Sure, you’re at the bottom heading upwards and blasting anything that shows up (usually from the top of the screen), so it’s definitely a vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up.  And the twin-stick aiming doesn’t have the range of motion to make it a proper twin-stick shooter.  You really just get around 25 degrees of aiming to each direction.  But it’s not quite a ‘Euro’ style shooter.  There’s too much going on for that.  But equally it’s not really bullet hell as, while there is some proper bullet madness, the attacks don’t come in waves and patterns all that much.  Instead what you have is more ‘bullet chaos’ than ‘bullet hell.’

Playing on Medium, you’ll probably find yourself outgunned pretty quickly.  The enemies are everywhere and their bullets even more so.  Indeed, you get the sense that you’re not meant to be able to navigate their attacks unscathed which why there’s all that additional complexity with your shield system, not to mention the game drops shield pick ups for you a lot.  We’re not afraid to admit that we ended up dropping the difficulty down to Easy and even then it wasn’t a complete cakewalk.

The main issue with the game, and it’s probably the worst for this type of game, is that the screen gets very cluttered.  There’s no denying that the game looks pretty nice for a shoot ’em up, giving a much-wanted modern look that you normally don’t get in shoot ’em ups – especially vertical scrollers.  But there’s too much going on and the red bullets are pretty small and get lost among the also red flares that seem to show up at times.  It just doesn’t feel like a game where you can weave your way through the danger.  Instead you have to rely on those shields far too much.  It’s not completely awful, or unplayable, by any means but it’s definitely messy.

Another problem is the upgrade system.  It’s not explained by the tutorial and instead of letting you upgrade your weapons the traditional way, you really just get to design your bullet patterns which you can then cycle through at the touch of a button.  Oddly, these cost credits so where you might think you’re buying more guns (or ‘drones’ which just seem to be more guns), you’re really just buying options for where your bullets will go.  There are a couple of useful upgrades in there too – such as getting two extra ‘drones’ and more homing missiles – but really nothing game-changing, nothing empowering.  If you’re going to have such an obtuse upgrade system, at least make it worthwhile to actually upgrade.

However, going through the game’s seven stages, there’s a lot of fun to be had when you get to grips with CYGNI‘s complexities.  And while the stages are a little samey, and a touch too long at ten minutes or more each, it’s a real treat to play a high quality shoot ’em up.  And look, we’ve moaned quite a bit so far, and we’re not totally done (the boss battles are a bit bullet-spongey, the amount of credits you earn playing levels is inconsistent and the game crashed on us at least twice) but the game can be fun and impressive.

It’s probably a bit harder to make a vertically-scrolling shooter wow players visually compared to a horizontal one but CYGNI does have a few moments where it manages it.  It’s got that high-res look of something like Ikaruga but with the occasional massive structure whizzing by below or the occasional Stranger Things moment where something dark and foreboding is peaking through the murky depths of space.  And the more you play the game, the more you’ll get from it.

Casual players might just be done with Easy mode though.  That gives you three lives where as Normal and Hard are a one and done affair (as is the Arcade mode).  That’s pretty mean considering how easy it is for you to get completely lit up by enemy firepower.  And if that means that they are limited to just a few playthroughs on Easy, the £30 price tag might not offer great value for money.  Hardcore, talented shoot ’em up players however will definitely be satisfied if they can see past the game’s niggles.