LifeisXbox’s Gleylancer review | The publisher behind Gleylancer is mainly known for easy 1000 Gamerscore experiences and sometimes questionable game quality. There are exceptions and Gleylancer is one of them. This brilliant shoot’em up (or Shmup) is a love letter to the genre and while the visuals are dated (it is a Sega Megadrive port) the gameplay is undeniably great. There’s more ambition to be found here besides a quick port, Ratalaika has done great lengths of additional work for adjusting visuals, English translations and more modern controls. A cheater’s mode is also available and I have used this option to be able to write this review faster, in this mode you can skip levels or toggle an invincibility cheat. Being immortal takes out the fun though, so I don’t recommend using this.
This is a short review, our usual the good, mixed and the bad was difficult because of the nature of this game.
So what is going on while playing Gleylancer? You take control of Gleylancer, a ship being controlled by a young pilot named Luca. Her father has been kidnapped by aliens and that’s why you battle it out in space against an entire alien army. Let’s be honest here, we don’t play a Shmup for the story but it was a nice surprise that a lot of effort has been done with dialogue and nice-looking cutscenes. We play this kind of game to survive bullet hells and destroy vessels as quickly as possible.
Gleylancer is uniquely set up as you can configure how it shoots and moves around the horizontal-scrolling screen. You decide your tactics, do you want to auto-aim? Focus all your fire in your rear? There’s some tweaking to be done and playing around with all the options is fun and rewarding. Whatever you decide you will die, Gleylancer will explode hundreds of times. This isn’t an easy game and even easy will be a huge challenge for all gamers. Even diehard Shmup fans! Boss fights especially are borderline crazy and will require a lot of patience and skills. To help the player you have a rewind option and quick saving but even with those two helplines, it remains incredibly tough. But in case you didn’t know, we Shmup gamers love the challenge!
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