Full review of the PSVR version of bullet-hell shoot ’em up Rhythm ‘n Bullets from DB Creations.
Rhythm ‘n Bullets drops you into a wireframe shoot ‘em up slash bullet-hell world where your mission is to defend the core from attack by using two ships to dodge bullets and shoot the approaching enemies. I can confirm it contains both rhythm and bullets so it certainly lives up to its name but let me go into a bit more detail.
First though, thanks to the developers DB Creations for providing me with a review key for the game but as always the opinions presented here are my own.
There’s no particular back-story to explain so I’ll jump straight into the gameplay.
It’s a fairly straightforward concept, although with a few challenging twists. You’re placed in one spot, directly controlling two ships, one with each hand. In effect they work more like guns, with the only difference being that whilst shooting you also have to maneuver them around to avoid being hit by bullets or incoming enemies. In front of you is a blue sphere, otherwise known as the core, which you have to defend as once its energy bar is depleted it’s game over. Waves of enemies appear, advancing and firing towards the core in time with the music, and you have to dispose of them before you become overwhelmed. It’s here that one of the first twists arises and that is that for your bullets to be effective you have to change the colour of them to match the enemies that you’re trying to shoot. You have three colours to cycle through, so even if you set each of your two ships to a different colour, you’ll still have a third colour that you need to switch to at times, which is just enough to get you flustered and panicking as things become more intense. As you shoot and successfully hit enemies you’ll increase a multiplier and also the power and spread of your shots. Conversely, if you get hit too much you’ll lose your multiplier and go back to basic single shots. Another twist where the rhythm part comes into play is that if you shoot on the beat your shots become homing bullets that seek out the enemy, so even if your aim wasn’t perfect you’re still likely to hit them. You can activate a brief shield on each ship, just enough to deflect incoming shots or push away enemy ships in a pinch, and also fire a shield-busting shot which is required against some enemies to bring down their shields before you can get rid of them. At the end of each level you’ll face a boss-fight of sorts against a large spherical enemy where you’ll need to use a combination of the skills you’ve learnt, dodging their attacks, deflecting bullets back at them to break their shield, then shooting them with the right colour to weaken them.
At random you’ll also get some powerups appearing which can help get you out of a tight squeeze, including time slowdown, rapid fire bullets and missiles, which destroy enemies of any colour.
If it sounds like a lot to remember, that’s because it is. At first trying to do all these things at once is like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time and can be quite overwhelming. However, playing for longer you gradually develop strategies and muscle-memory which goes a long way to making things seem fairer and more achievable. Having said that, I’ve found that when it all falls apart it is sometimes possible to get out of a situation simply by spamming the buttons to constantly fire and change bullet colours, although this isn’t my recommended tactic and is certainly nothing to be proud of.
The game offers up three different modes, campaign, endless and relax. The main campaign is played out over three levels, each with a different background, whilst the endless mode where you’re fighting for high-scores features those same three backgrounds plus two others, one of which is particularly festive and one with a bit of a PlayStation theme to it. The relax mode lets you pick a background and allows you to spawn enemies and powerups at will and also lets you add and remove the music channels which also synchronises with the background animation and changes your shot strength. The campaign won’t take you long to complete, probably no more than an hour once you’ve got the hang of things. Relax mode is fine for a little play around but feels a bit redundant and I can’t see it holding anyone’s attention for too long. The main meat of the game is in the Endless mode and trying to get through as many increasingly difficult waves as possible to beat the high-scores in the global leaderboard.
As you can see from the footage, the graphics have a retro, wireframe look to them and it gives the game the feeling of playing on an old arcade machine like Tempest, or some of the Jeff Minter classics albeit with no llamas. The backgrounds are colourful with some animation going on but are essentially static in the sense that you’re stuck to the same spot throughout the level. This is great for those prone to motion sickness but I would have liked to have seen some movement through each level, even if it was just turning on the spot or progressing forwards through a series of fixed waypoints after each wave. Another gripe is that it’s sometimes difficult to see the enemies against the backgrounds, although a nice little touch to help with this problem is that the core in front of you contains coloured lines pointing in the direction of incoming enemies to help you spot them. There are some settings to modify the bullet colours and make them a bit more colour-blind friendly, which is always nice to see, although regardless of what setting you have it’s sometimes quite hard to see which colour bullet is active as although it’s shown in the outline of the ship, the colours of the ship itself tend to interfere a bit. You usually have to deduce it by looking at the two solid dots of colour either side of your ship which show the unselected colours, or by firing off a few shots to remind yourself.
You can unlock a few different skins and models for your ships but these are purely cosmetic and all play the same, although in theory some of the thinner ships might be fractionally better for dodging bullets.
The soundtrack is limited, with different music for each of the five levels, but what’s there is really catchy with a nice mix of original synthwave and electronic tracks. You’ve also got the slightly remixable versions in the relax mode if you want to change it up a bit. The sound effects are functional with a range of arcade sounding bleeps and bloops and I liked the little bits of electronic speech throughout.
The game only supports Move controllers, so if you’ve just got a DualShock then you’re out of luck. There’s quite a few controls to remember but the buttons are mapped well enough, the trigger fires, the move button activates the shield, the cross and circle buttons cycle through colours and pressing the trigger and move buttons together fires a shield-breaker bullet. As the movement of your ships is mapped one-to-one to your controllers it feels a bit more like waving a pair of guns around in the air rather than controlling two spaceships as they don’t have any weight to them. Admittedly there’s not much that could be done about that as adding any kind of drag or delay would make it frustrating to control, however I’d love to at least see some little vapor trails coming from the ships as you move them around. Playing this game for a certain amount of time can actually become quite tiring on the arms and could be used as a pretty decent arm workout. It might have been nice to have an optional one-handed mode where you could just use a single controller, or even the DualShock, to control one ship, although this might have become too challenging without some tweaks to the enemy patterns.
So, overall this is a small but well-formed package which I really enjoyed. There’s not a huge amount of content but what’s there is polished and fun to play and the gameplay mechanics add some originality and keep things challenging. It won’t take you long to complete the campaign mode and unlock everything so keep in mind that a lot of the replayability comes from chasing high scores. It would be nice to see a few more levels included, particularly in the campaign mode, but bearing in mind the asking price is a very reasonable £8 on the UK store I’d say it’s pretty good value for money.
