CYGNI: All Guns Blazing game review; A new generation of Eshmap style

Earlier this year, Konami announced CYGNI: All Guns Blazing, pronounced “cygni,” in the “shoot 'em up” genre. The “shoot 'em up” style, which professional gamers call “Shmup” for short, is one of the oldest genres in the world of computer games. This style was created for the first time 46 years ago with the game Space Invaders. A style in which we control a ship or plane and is usually shown from a top or right angle. Over time, famous games were made in this style, and even this style was opened to mobile phones with popular titles such as the Sky Force series.

Now the “Eshmap” style is going to be forgotten as one of the grandfathers of computer games; But Konami wants to remind everyone with the release of the “Signy” game that this style is still far from the end of its life. Signi is made by a small studio called KeelWorks, which employs only 11 people.

Naturally, the first thing that will attract your attention upon entering the game is its attractive and eye-catching graphics. While most of the e-map style games are presented with pixelated and retro graphics, Signi is really different and uses Unreal Engine 4, and it can even be a good reason to attract gamers in this style. Of course, such a heavy graphic has its disadvantages. For example, a lot of intense lights and successive vibrations after each explosion make you sometimes not even understand what you should be doing.

In addition, to install Signi, you need to free up 20 to 25 GB of internal memory on your console or computer. This volume may be reasonable for modern games, but for an e-map game that is supposed to take two to three hours to finish, it is a large number. It's good to know that Signi is available for all common platforms, including PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series, Nintendo Switch and PC, and runs on new generation consoles with 4K resolution and 60 frames per second.

Signi, like most e-map style games, is a very difficult game. Those who turn to this style of games must have the nerve to dodge thousands of bullets and lose their ship many times. So even if you are one of the old timers of this style, it is better to enter the Tutorial section at the very beginning to get to know the mechanics of the game such as energy management between defense shield and weapons and other complex things.

If you visit Signi's Steam store page, you will find a very low score of around 55%. The main criticism of this game is that it is too hard. As someone who has completed a large number of e-map games in four decades of my life, I must claim that Signy is truly one of the most difficult games of this genre. In fact, this game was so hard for me that after a few 10 failures, I had to set the difficulty level of the game to Easy.

Signi requires a lot of concentration and speed of action. You should be able to switch the ship's resources on the fly between defensive shields and weapon power. For example, if your ship is about to be destroyed, you should immediately reduce the power of the weapons and transfer all power to the defense shield. After you manage to repair your ship by collecting a series of “triangles”, you can again reduce the power of the defensive shield and strengthen the weapons. Even if you can master this, you still won't be able to handle the giants easily, especially in the early game. Of course, you have to focus a lot to attack air and ground enemies.

In fact, the game requires you to experience each stage several times so that you can improve your weapons and fight the giants. For example, until you have taken the “tracker” weapon, you cannot easily destroy the first giant of the game, because in this fight you have to go around the first giant of the game, and only the tracker weapon can hurt him in this situation.

To upgrade your ship and weapons, you need to collect a series of “triangles” that are left behind by your enemies; The same triangles that we mentioned earlier. Of course, these triangles only become game money when your ship's defense shield does not need to be repaired; Otherwise, they will pay for its repair; So you can earn good money from the game stages when you are powerful enough to kill all the enemies quickly.

The summary of all these words is that the game Signi becomes enjoyable and addictive when you not only master the mechanics of the game, but you have played it so much that all your weapons are strengthened as much as possible. You have to finish the game two or three times to be able to boost everything to the end; But when you reach that stage, the game becomes really interesting and you can try higher difficulty levels and try to break your previous record; Something that is ideal in all e-map style games.

So if at first, Signi was not attractive to you and its excessive difficulty crushed your nerves; Don't be disappointed. When you set the difficulty level of the game to Easy, you can finish it quickly and experience the game next time with better weapons and higher difficulty level. You can continue this several times and you will gradually reach the point where you move between the throats like a professional YouTuber and destroy all the enemies with a smile. It is at this stage that you will understand why Signi is considered an attractive and addictive game.

Despite this, we can't call Cygny a flawless e-map game. For example, many game mechanics are not properly taught and you have to learn them yourself little by little. In addition, in terms of sound and especially music, which has always been one of the strengths of Eshmap games, we cannot give Signi a good score. If you are one of the fans of this genre, we recommend that you also play exciting new games like Devil Blade and Valfaris Mecha Therion.

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing game is checked on PC with the code sent by the publisher.