By: Omar (@siegarettes)

• Hangeki
• Developer - Pentavera
• Publisher - Pentavera
• PC (Steam)
• Rating - N/A

There’s always room for improvement. That’s the philosophy behind Pentavera’s shoot-em-up, Hangeki. Eschewing the typical complex scoring systems of the genre, Hangeki grades you on only one thing: how fast you complete the stage. To get through each of the ten stages you’ll be given a host of weapons, with more unlocking as you gain experience and level up. It’s a curious mix of a traditionally Japanese dominated genre and the Western progression sensibilities that have become popularized by the Modern Warfare series. It’s an approach that’s apparently intended to create more of a sandbox approach to completing stages and remove the high knowledge requirements of scoring systems, multipliers and secrets that are involved in modern shoot-em-ups.

To this end the developers have removed the focus from destroying every enemy and moved it to quickly building up the charge for the titular Hangeki, a bomb style screen clearing weapon. Destroying enemies in quick succession and grabbing the pickups will also give you experience and charge a rapidly draining meter used to unlock and use your chosen sub-weapons. Take this to waves of Space Invader style enemy formations and you’ve got the basic blocks of the game.

Hangeki doesn’t make quite a great first impression. An inconsistent sense of art direction plagues the visuals and interface, giving it some harsh edges and revealing the seams of the game. Some of the meters and laser attacks in particular make me suspect the game was put together with the ever popular GameMaker creation tool. This isn’t a fault in of itself, as many great games have been created with similar tools, but it is distracting in the same way as games that say, use the default Unity launcher. It doesn’t quite feel complete and makes it feel inconsistent with the rest of the game. The backgrounds and textures feel ripped from some database, and the enemy designs aren’t very memorable. It’s honestly a bit garish. The music fares a bit better, but it quickly gets lost in the fracas. The option to use either a modern instrumentation or a more “retro” styled soundtrack is a nice touch, however. Still, there are plenty of doujin shooters that have similar problems, or overuse the annoying “moe” approach that hide a lot depth, so I was willing to give it a bit of leeway.

On first approach, Hangeki’s systems work well enough. Running through enemies and building up a combo while charging your weapons builds a satisfying progression. Worth noting however is that the gamepad controls just feel off. Whether using digital or analog (which to their credit actually responding as analog) control felt floating and imprecise. Switching to keyboard controls made the game feel much more at home, strangely. For the first half of the game there’s an interesting interplay between weapons, with new ones providing new approaches. I did find a lot of weapons to be much more effective than others, however. Whether it was the situational or meter demand of the weapons, a lot of them felt basically useless. Some of them tend to dominate the leaderboards as well, at least at time of writing. Still, it gave an interesting sandbox approach to levels and gave some incentive to return to older stages to improve.

Past the halfway mark, however, and Hangeki’s flaws become more pronounced. It becomes obvious that there are some serious flaws with the basic design. As the amount of bullets approaches manic levels, bullets begin to get lost in the flurry. The colors blend with the backgrounds and laser fire (there’s a reason CAVE makes their bullets pink and blue). The hitbox for your ship becomes a hard to make out, and the trajectories of the bullets become simultaneously predictable and hard to avoid. Later stages have groups of enemies all firing forward moving projectiles at once, creating a sort of lane you need to stay within. Alongside that are enemies that fire attacks that mark a circular zone and then attack, making that space unsafe. The problem with these is that the spacing is essentially random, picking a random distance from where you are and peppering it with unsafe zones. The best SHMUPs will fire bullets in patterns that interplay with each other, leaving multiple gaps and paths to dance through in the chaos. This is obvious even in the procedurally generated patterns of Kenta Cho’s SHMUPs. By adding this element of chance it makes it difficult to properly navigate the space and predict where the safe zones are. It creates a frustrating lack of control and forces you to either prevent the bullets form being created entirely, or constantly use a shield to cut through it. Except that each weapon is on a cooldown, which means you can easily find yourself in a position where you are stuck. It seems that Pentavera were aware of this, as they give you an absurd amount of lives to complete each stage. Ideally, it’d be possible to complete each stage without a single hit, and while it might be possible, it would be a frustrating and unrewarding endeavor to attempt it here. The patch notes indicate that Pentavera are taking steps to help improve these aspects of the game (such as applying outlines and darkening backgrounds to make bullets stand out more), but these are fundamental flaws that will be hard to simply fix with small changes.

There are some other small areas that suffer from a lack of polish as well. Aside from the aforementioned menus and control issues, small things like the placement of the weapon bars and icons forcing you to take your eyes off the action to check on them. Creating some indicator near your ship or making them a bit larger would help. Additionally, it can be frustrating to attempt to use a weapon right before the bar runs out and find that it dropped down to almost full. Giving it a bit of hang time before dropping down to the previous power level would solve that problem. It also doesn’t quite feel right to chain almost every enemy together and then be forced to run down your bar while waiting for the boss to appear. The need to level up and unlock your chosen weapons during each stage also feels arbitrary, especially since you can order your weapons as you like. These are mostly nitpicks, but these are the kind of things that SHMUP lovers will notice, and that bring the polish that contributes a lot a game’s feel.

For casual shooter fans and score attack lovers there’s a decent amount of enjoyment to find here. Aside from the replayable stages, there are a few challenges that force you to play in new ways to improve. For serious fans of the genre, however, Hangeki lacks the polish and unity of design that defines the best shooters. Hangeki feels like an amateur project in the original sense, a game by lovers of the genre wanting to create their own take on it, but lacking the experience and intuition to makes something that can stand with its contemporaries. There’s always room for improvement.