MACROSS Shooting Insight – PS5 Review

MACROSS – Shooting Insight – is a shoot ’em up based on the popular Japanese anime franchise, Macross (AKA Robotech in the West) and it’s been developed by Kaminari Games (otherwise known for Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid Burst Forth!! Chorogon*Breath just in case you didn’t realise they were from Japan).

There’s a story of course, some madness about going to rescue missing songstresses by battling in space, but it’s told via static cutscenes, shrieking anime voice acting and lots of text.  If you like old sounding men saying ‘hmph’ and young women squealing then you’ll be fine but annoyingly the story continues, during gameplay, via tiny text boxes in the corner of the screen.  Not something you’ll be able to follow without getting killed.

Now, usually we’d say what type of shoot ’em up this is.  Horizontally-scrolling, vertically-scrolling, top down twin-stick or into the screen but, here’s the thing, Shooting Insight is all of the above.

What you get is ten stages, each of which lasts between 4-5 minutes.  These usually start in either a vertical or horizontal aspect, before switching to one of the other types.  The scrolling stages are pretty straightforward.  You fly from the left or bottom of the screen, enemies fly in ahead of you and you take them out with one of your three weapon systems.

There’s a bit of complexity here.  Your primary weapon, mapped to R1, is a normal gun/laser with a firing pattern set by whichever of the five playable characters you pick.  A machine gun, a laser, a dual laser, a three way spread and a five way spread are your choices.  They do all feel a bit weedy though with no upgrades to pick up and bolster them with apart from a system that slowly levels up the weapon up to level five but even there it can feel a bit weak.

You also have a missile lock-on system which is mapped to the right stick.   You just aim, let go and watch the missiles fly.   The downside though is that this interrupts your primary weapon.  It’s also a bit slow and clumsy and can leave you a bit vulnerable but the missiles you fire are quite powerful.

Last up is your support attack which is a screen-clearing smart attack which is pretty powerful.  This is linked to a meter that shows you how much energy you have left for that type of attack, which is a clumsier way of just showing you how much bomb stock you’ve got.  There’s a reason that every other shoot ’em up does it that way.

Our first impressions weren’t great.  The weak weaponry, the clumsy lock ons, the unimaginative enemy types, the dreary backdrops.  There’s not much here to get the heart racing but where the game does perk up is with the way it switches between shoot ’em up styles.

Aside from some minor visual clarity issues, the vertical and horizontal sections work well.  They’re pretty traditional but it’s always pretty fun seeing a shoot ’em up switch up styles like that.  The top down twin-stick sections aren’t as good but are still pretty playable.  The into-the-screen sections were a bit of a mess to play though.

The game manages the transitions pretty well though which is to say that the difficulty curve stays pretty consistent throughout the changes.  A couple of the boss battles are a bit trickier than others but that’s just down to how they move and how difficult their attacks are to avoid.

What maybe lets the game down the most is how repetitive it can get, despite the four different playstyles.  The visuals are quite unchanging for the first eight stages and the boss designs are quite unremarkable.  The last two do pick up though which makes things a bit better, at the game ends on a high, but it’s never all that impressive.  But at least the game offers up some extra modes, including a 1v1 boss mode which is kind of interesting for a minute.

Also, and this was a big issue for us, the game often kicks in with some proper cheesy Japanese pop music which can totally detract from the vibe of the game.  Shoot ’em ups are meant to have electro or rock soundtracks, maybe orchestral if you’re being fancy, but having sugar rush melodramatic pop just isn’t the way.  It’s as jarring as it is irritating.

But at £34.99, this is a pricey game that never quite wows you enough to justify the price tag.  There’s no real eye candy, the dynamics of the action and kind of staid and unchanging and the story is kind of impenetrable.  But, if you care about Macross and songstresses, then maybe it’ll be worth your time.  Not sure it’ll ever be worth this high a price tag though.