No, this is not a review of the entire genre. This is a review of the IGF China Finalist, S.H.M.U.P. This foray into the shooter genre is worthy of some accolades (hey, the IGF judges can’t be that ridiculous, can they?), but it’s not easy reinventing the wheel. The Shm’up genre has essentially been with gaming since day one, and in a world where Ikaruga exists, there’s a lot of expectation for new things that shm’ups can do. Thanks to Charcoal Styles for sending us a copy to review.

S.H.M.U.P. looked like an interesting game, what with its minimal art style, seemingly intuitive controls, and pretty good soundtrack. The only thing you control is the ship, and you move the mouse to do so. You’re defending a wall from torrents of oncoming enemies, which are geometric shapes. Sounds exciting, right?

An Even Playing Field

As you play the game you get points for every level that you beat (in addition to your score for the level). You can spend these points on various upgrades for your “ship” such as more guns, missile upgrades and speed boosts. As you gain more points you get more guns/missiles. If you get hit, you lose portions of your ship resulting in less guns. Like in Galaga when you let the Boss Galaga capture your ship, if  you get hit after you reclaim it you lose the second ship.

There are three modes to get points in; one is the basic, gradually increasing in difficulty over 15 levels, the other two are challenge modes where you get random spawns of enemies from the game. You can get points from either but the challenge ones are more difficult because you have to get more upgrades for your ship before you can even hope to get past the first wave or two.

In a Shm’up the focus of the game is getting a higher score than your previous run and then comparing it to everyone else that’s playing. The only way this really works is if everyone has an even playing field, with the same stats, starting guns, and the same ship. If you’re wondering why you can’t beat the high score, the reason is because the guy on top has five times as many missile bays as you do. But, if you keep playing the first few levels to get enough points to get more missile bays, you can do it!

This feels like a cheap way to get more play time out of the game to me. You can’t beat the game with the default ship. You will play through the first couple of levels ‘” not practising, like you would with a normal shm’up, but getting your wall destroyed by an overwhelming amount of enemies that you can’t stop ‘” several times trying to beef up your ship enough so you can progress further.

Precision, Precision, Precision.

One of the most important parts of a shm’up are the shooting mechanics. S.H.M.U.P. is a horizontal shooter, your “ship” is positioned on the left side of the screen with a wall behind it, and the enemy “ships” cascade at you from the right. I use the quotations on the word “ship(s)” because everything in the game is a very minimal, basic geometric shape. Your ship consists of circles, the enemies are a mixture of triangles and trapezoids and the wall that you are supposed to defend looks like teeth.

You control your ship by moving the mouse pointer around on the screen, and the ship moves to it shortly after you do and it kind of bounces around. This gets to be really irritating on more difficult levels where there is a lot of enemy fire incoming, and you have to either move slowly as to avoid causing too much excess movement that isn’t intended, or you can move quickly and most likely lose half of your firing power by slamming into the torrents of enemies. The ship also fires automatically, making it difficult to time when you need to stay still in one place and fire or move quickly to defend the wall against a torrent of triangles.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• The seemingly simple geometric shapes form larger, more complex shapes as the levels go on, making for a better challenge.
• It has a faster, more aggressive feel in the music than I feel is necessary for the pace of the game/aesthetic. Things slowly approaching you isn’t exactly menacing.

S.H.M.U.P. is a deconstruction of the shooter, plain and simple. Gone are the super-precise bullet hell scenes out of Mushihimesama. What you have here is a frustratingly simple shooter that doesn’t quite work that well, but at the same time is a very beautiful attempt at making something great. While it “doesn’t need pixel perfect positioning, lightening reflexes or for you to remember bullet patterns”, it would definitely make the earlier levels’” and thereby getting upgrades ‘” a bit more bearable.

You should buy this game if…

…you hate shooters, but are interested in the genre. The simplicity of this game might have you entranced.

Final Score

A noble attempt at reinventing the shooter, but over simplistic nature of the game doesn’t lend itself well to the genre. The lack of precision in control makes for more frustration than it does fun.

(What does this score mean?)