There’s quite an infamous old magazine advert for the Neo Geo that depicts a woman in lingerie in the foreground, a guy in the background in the middle of a game, and the caption “I remember when he couldn’t keep his hands off me !” (sic) emblazoned across the top of the page.
That’s all most people will know of this particular piece of typical 90’s era marketing, but anyone who has taken the time to read the text below will find that, alongside “15 Channels of pure pulsating stereo sound” and “65,000 colors”, the ad also claimed that the distracted young man was enjoying “vivid four-dimensional graphics”...
I don’t know which of the Neo Geo’s resolutely 2D games this particular piece of hyperbole was aimed at, but it popped into my head this morning while playing REVOLVER360 RE:ACTOR, a game that genuinely feels like an entire new axis has been stapled to the world as we know it.
It’s very much the norm to classify scrolling shooters into either ‘Horizontal’ or 'Vertical' categories. I much prefer to classify them as either ‘aggressive’ or ‘defensive’, as this helps me to judge whether or not I will like the game.
I very much prefer the aggressive type, Gradius or Axelay, for example, where the focus is on shooting down the enemy. Defensive shooters are more commonly known as ‘bullet-hell’, where your primary concern is to avoid vast waves of enemy plasma.
REVOLVER360 RE:ACTOR is a Japanese made shmup that is clearly of the horizontal variety, as to whether it’s aggressive or defensive though… that’s not such an easy label to assign.
It’s a stunning looking game, with almost monochromatic neon stylings brought to life with enormous blasts of multi-coloured weapons-fire assaulting your craft, and your senses, from every direction. It’s part Tron, part Rez, part something all it’s own.
There’s a lot going on and this stripped back, hyper-stylised design choice means it’s not only clear and easy to understand, but ensures there are no technical hiccoughs along the way.
The accompanying soundtrack can quickly be summed as ‘thumping’ with a side of ‘slightly forgettable’. It’s a perfect accompaniment to the action though, blending with explosions and a wide variety of pew-pew-pews to create a very enjoyable kind of cacophony.
But as fantastic as the game looks and sounds, it’s the world that all this is depicting, and the method by which you navigate it, that are the real differentiators for the game.
I went in totally blind and was shocked to find that, very early on, an enemy attacked me with what appeared to be a completely impassable wall of fire.
The game gives you three weapons with which to set about the enemy, each having specific strengths, weaknesses, and properties. You also have two other controls to consider; Roll left, and roll right. In the scenario described above, with a floor to ceiling wall of plasma heading towards me, I simply revolved 90 degrees and the wall of fire became a thin, easy to avoid line. It's a brilliant mechanic but this example is not even half of it.
If you imagine the levels of this game as a cylinder through which you fly (in reality it’s far more complex than that, but for the sake of simplicity, lets start there) enemies not only approach from either end, as you’d expect, but are additionally positioned around the inside wall. These are targeted and attacked with homing missiles as long as you position yourself above them.
So at any given point in the game you can have enemies, and their weapons fire, coming at you from any direction. And that's not up, down, left, right ‘any direction’, but a full spherical, 360ºs on 360ºs of ‘any direction’. The most amazing thing about the game is how quickly this all makes sense and begins to feel completely natural to navigate.
It’s definitely a very tough game, but a fair one, and it never feels as overwhelming as certain examples of the bullet-hell genre - there’s even a challenge mode which serves as both tutorial and high score chase for a long dead online leaderboards.
I love it when I find a game that is truly unique, and REVOLVE360 RE:ACTOR is, in my experience at least, very much that. There’s no other shooter, or game of any genre for that matter, that so expertly manages the sphere of action that is offered here.
Always challenging, never overwhelming, this is a masterpiece of shmup design that should be played by even the most casual fans of the genre.
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