Developers: Orange Juice
Publisher: Orange Juice, Arkanoid Games
Platform: PC
Flying Red Barrel – Review
Orange Juice, a Japanese Doujin group and the creators of Suguri, brought us a new top-down shooter, Flying Red Barrel – Diary of a Little Aviator. Maneuvering your plane through projectiles while shooting down your enemies. Put on your goggles and aviator helmet, because you’re in for a hell of a ride.
Story:
The game takes place ten years after The Blue Sky Union has been formed to bring order to the skies, which is explained to us in the intro movie.
The story is not brought in a great way, the conversations between characters is happening in the sides of the screen while you are playing. You’ll be focusing more on trying to stay alive then reading the conversations, which makes it really hard to follow the story. It’s great they tried to mix in a story in a top-down shooter but it should have been brought differently, so that you can actually follow the story.
Graphics:
The graphics of the game are in the style of SNES games, which makes it nostalgic for every SNES generation gamer. The backgrounds are very colorful, which makes the game very beautiful.
Sound:
The music of the game is good, but not memorable at all. The next day you won’t be able to hum the song that was playing while you were shooting like your life depended on it.
Gameplay:
The objective of the game is shooting down your enemies and meanwhile collecting coins. The more coins you collect, the more lives and rockets you achieve and the more points you get. There is a little choice you have to make over and over while playing, to collect coins or to shoot more enemies. Because when you stop shooting you automatically collect coins as they will come your way if you are close enough. At these times, usually when there are a lot of coins still to collect when there are also a lot of enemies, you will have to decide to go for the coins, or to shoot all the enemies.
The controls are fairly easy, the directional buttons to fly and two other buttons. One to shoot your bullets and the other one to shoot rockets. It also works perfectly with a controller, which I found a little handier than with the keyboard.
To finish the game you’ll have to complete it in one playthrough, as you can’t save your progress. However every stage cleared will become available in practice mode so you can replay the stages without having to go through all the other stages again. Completing the game in one run is not as hard as it may seems, you have a few lives and 2 continues to start with and as you know you can earn lives by collecting enough coins.
Conclusion:
Flying Red Barrel is a decent top-down shooter, but it doesn’t stand out in the genre. It lacks somewhat in originality. This however doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. It’s real fun to play and excellent to pass time. The game itself is quite challenging so you’ll never get bored. Too bad about the story, this could have been a game changer. Hopefully they take this flaw into account in there next game.
No Comments