Simply spectacular
Astebreed does everything right. The shooting is satisfying, the visuals are gorgeous, the difficulty curve is spot-on, and it has just the right balance of challenge and forgiveness to keep things interesting but not frustrating.
The weakest point is actually the story. It's interesting, but pretty cliche, and it while it touches on themes like transhumanism, it doesn't really dive into them much as it could. There's still far more plot here than most shmups, which is both a good and bad thing. Good because it gives more context to the shooting, and bad because it's really hard to read dialogue subtitles while you're dodging bullets.
It's a minor annoyance for me that you can't hold down the fire button to continuously fire, but then that was sacrificed so you could have a (quite useful) charging lock-on attack, so it's not such a big deal.
The game's central gimmick is a really cool one: the camera angles change constantly, seamlessly shifting the game between vertical-scrolling shmup, side-scrolling shmup, and 3D behind-the-back (like StarFox) shmup. This works surprisingly well, and it makes the stages feel more dynamic. It's especially cool during the boss fights, when the camera shifts multiple times during the fight, depending on how the boss is attacking you.
I whole-heartedly recommend Astebreed, as I thoroughly enjoyed it. And if you like this, I also recommend its spiritual predecessor Ether Vapor, which sadly isn't on GOG as of this writing.
42 gamers found this review helpful