by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Devil Engine
• Developer: Protoculture Games
• Publisher: Dangen Entertainment
• Switch, PC

From mechanics, aesthetics, down to the extra modes and gameplay options, Devil Engine is saturated with homage to arcade shooters, new and old. It’d be easy to catalog them, and breakdown every influence it takes from its arcade family. But in the heat of the action, Devil Engine gave me an almost racer like vibe. Momentum is deeply important, and losing it feels a lot like running yourself off the road. Knowing how to control my speed and where to attack the stage’s corners and enemy formations is key. Explaining exactly why is complicated, so let’s break it down.

Devil Engine revolves around its multiplier and burst system. Quickly destroying waves of enemies builds a multiplier, which increases you score, which determines when you get your next bomb, when you earn another life and how large the defensive burst you create is. Using a burst clears bullets in the immediate area but it’ll decrease your multiplier. Canceling a large group of bullets earns it back. Spamming it leads to weaker bursts that leave you vulnerable, so you’re encouraged to use it only to defend against large groups of bullets, both to keep it effective and to keep the multiplier active.

Devil Engine’s enemy and bullet patterns are aggressive, so to keep that multiplier up you’ll need to be aggressive in turn. Playing defensively and hanging back is a good way to let the screen be filled with overwhelming firepower, leading to a lot more deaths and a starved arsenal. Especially on the default, “Very Hard” difficulty, bullet speed edges on impossible to react to, and boss safe zones tend to force you closer to them.

This is where course knowledge becomes key. I found intercepting enemy waves to cut off attacks before they appeared and allowed me more space to maneuver. In turn, my multiplier increased, building my stock of bombs quicker, allowing me to use them more aggressively to take down groups that took more time for my standard weapons to dispose of.

Corresponding to the three available shot types, bombs are more extensions of the regular functions than the screen clearing lasers or explosions you’d expect. They’re honestly a bit underwhelming, never feeling like the momentum shifting tools that they are elsewhere in the genre.

Knowing each weapon and bomb type, and where to deploy them, is essential course knowledge, however. Spread shot covers large groups well, lasers cut through larger targets and are the go to for bosses, and homing is suited to small, weak enemies waves or for trying to curve around angles that are otherwise blocked by the stage. Each shot type is obtained by getting the appropriate pickup, and has three levels of strength, though anything above the first level is usually adequate.

The arsenal is small enough that Devil Engine might have benefited from a system that kept each type on hand, a la Harmful Park or later Thunder Force entries, but powerups are frequent enough, and shot types can be cycled by hitting powerups with a burst, so getting the right weapon is rarely a problem.

More problematic is the way Devil Engine plays into the macho attitudes of “hardcore” gaming mentalities. The easier difficulty is initially locked off, but after it’s quickly unlocked it greets you with description texts like “ FOR COWARDS” or “WHY DON’T YOU CHALLENGE YOURSELF FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE?”, making it clear that it’s not the intended experience. A few of the more cheeky lines such as “Bullet Tranqulity” or “the wind will surely carry me along” strike a bit better balance, but alongside details like how it plasters EASY MODE on the corner of your screen Devil Engine often shames you for not going all in from the go.

Despite being put off by this attitude, I did give Devil Engine’s Very Hard difficulty a good effort, but I quickly found it to be a poor way to get acquainted with the stages. The overwhelming speed of enemy attacks makes it near impossible to navigate bullet patterns the first time through. Devil Engine hits you with nasty surprises periodically to keep you dialed in, but this has the side effect of destroying your momentum, which leads to agonizing death spirals if you’re unprepared. To return to the racing metaphor, jumping immediately into hard mode is the same as trying to drive 120 MPH down a track you’ve never raced on before, hoping you somehow don’t total your vehicle at the first set of corners.

I found it more productive to get acquainted with the stages in easy mode first, learning the general enemy patterns and stage flow, then try my hand at hard mode after a few runs, to slowly get used to the additional dangers there. This still gave me a serious challenge, even on Very Easy (which is anything but), and allowed me to understand the nuances of the weapon and combo system, as well as map out which of the three movement speed settings to switch to during each part of the stage. No matter how you play it, Devil Engine is going to be merciless, and demand that you work hard to earn the course knowledge to survive, easy mode just makes less frustrating to do so.

Even then, there are still some hurdles to get through, thanks to some unfortunate issues. Devil Engine has a suite of extra modes, filters, and gameplay options, allowing you to adjust the HUD, bullet colors, background vibrancy, and hitbox visibility–all of which help tremendously with readability. These are unlocked automatically as you play, with your lifetime point total being the primary factor. As far as I can tell, however, there is not proper practice mode to allow you to play later stages by themselves, leaving me with a lot of practice for the first two levels, but often unprepared for the rest.

More painful are the bugs, which came up just enough to spoil several runs. My first major pain was a bug that caused to game to crash after unpausing the game. I’m not sure what caused it, so I couldn’t avoid it without avoiding pausing entirely. Which is pretty bad, considering that’s a basic function.

Less game breaking is the continue glitch, which occurs when using the quick restart function to start a new run without backing out to the menu. You earn several extra continues as you continue to play the game, which are essential to being able to practice later stages. Using quick restart breaks the count, resetting to the default of 2 continues, instead of the 8 or so I’d accumulated up to that point. So I had to go back to the menu to start a fresh run if I wanted to keep them. Kind of defeats the point of a quick restart, huh?

I might seem down on Devil Engine, but these problems mostly stand out because of the care taken everywhere else in the game. Devil Engine is worth experiencing on aesthetics alone. A lot of comparisons have been made to Saturn-era shooters, but Devil Engine benefits from modern production. Landscapes are rendered in high density pixel art, with lavishly detailed environments and several layers of parallax scrolling to give it visual depth. Diverse, multi-sprite flames scatter out of each explosion. There aren’t any modern shortcuts here–these are all individually animated, not made from a particle generator.

The same meticulous approach benefits elsewhere. Devil Engine opts to avoid using effects like alpha transparency, using dithering and stippling techniques to apply shading to objects and emulate colored layers. While using dithering for transparency could sometimes look cheap or cause artifacting on older systems, seeing it applied in high resolution creates a much finer “grain” which gives the game strong visual texture without drawing as much attention to itself. 

The color palettes and music imbue Devil Engine with serious verve. Red hues appropriately saturate vehicles and environments, often complemented by the dark green hues of enemies and their bases. The muted tones, paired with earthy brown and grey complements, keep the palette from becoming overwhelming or distracting. Rounded shapes and exposed tubes give Devil Engine’s machines a suggestion of the bio-organic, as if they swole and grew out from a machine seed. It’s distinct, carrying a bit of that gorgeous grotesque that I love.

Just as stylish is the soundtrack, composed of an eclectic mix of synths, guitar riffs and jazz that provides a good mix of energetic vibes. Composers Joseph
:Qwesta” Bailey, Mason Lieberman, and  Hyakutaro Tsukumo really kill it here. Particularly noteworthy is the stage 2 theme, which features an incredible arrangement of horns, lending it a powerful neo-noir feel.

Devil Engine is easily one of the most impressive recent entries in the shooter genre. Its marvelous aesthetics carry it through, and the aggressive approach to shooting forced me to commit myself to learning its spaces in a satisfying way. My frustrations with its attitudes toward difficulty and impossible to ignore technical problems definitely soured my time with it, but not enough to damage its core appeal. Otherwise, it’s a worthwhile entry into the genre, albeit one that might only speak to those already bought into it.