CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is a decent attempt at making a modern bullet hell shooter. However, an overreliance on self-praise and dated portrayals of female characters reduces it to a case study of things to avoid doing if you wish to succeed.
Singleplayer.
Co-op Multiplayer.
The developers of CYGNI: All Guns Blazing do not seem to understand the wisdom of the adage that “Self-praising Is No Praise At All” by describing their game as “An unrelenting onslaught of eye-popping visuals, ear-bursting soundscapes and mind-melting action.”
These are very strong claims to attribute to a game that is mechanically similar to dozens of other titles released over the past thirty years, with many a free flash game site of the late 1990s and early 2000s having more than their fair share of similar titles.
Don’t get me wrong. CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is very pretty, but good graphics alone do not sell games in this genre.
Strip away the flashy lights and oddly sexual cutscenes for a game of this type, and you are left with a very standard twin-stick shooter that is unlikely to appeal to fans of the genre, who have undoubtedly played many better games.
CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is very difficult on even easier difficulties because earlier missions are structured so that they are decisively more challenging than all subsequent missions, except for the final mission.
Unlike many difficult games, which allow players to farm expierance points to level up abilities even when they fail a mission so they may be better prepared to tackle it again, CYGNI: All Guns Blazing rewards no points unless players complete missions successfully, meaning that players who for one reason or another find a certain level too difficult to beat due to physical limitations have no chance of being able to farm a small advantage to ensure they can enjoy the game to its fullest.
I love difficult games, but making a game more accessible doesn’t diminish its difficulty; players are free not to take advantage of any aspect of the game they feel diminishes it in their eyes, but not providing those features or wanting them to be present is pretty insensitive, especially when many of the same people who are calling for such features to be axed from difficult games, would want to be shown consideration if for some reason they were suddenly unable to play the types of games they know and love physically.
I would have liked to see a well-respected publisher such as Konami do better in this regard, as they have recently been pretty good regarding accessibility in games, even if their portrayal of female characters is still lacking.
I must admit to having been surprised at just how cringe-inducing the opening cutscene for CYGNI: All Guns Blazing’s first mission is; while it begins benign enough, we first get several shots focusing on the main character’s bare legs before swapping to a scene where she is seen dropping her clothes to the ground, before finally focusing the scene on her mostly bare bottom, as she tugs her jumpsuit up and over her sizable rear end.
While I understand that people would see similar attire at any beach, the fact that the camera nearly crashes zooms into her rear end, and there was no reason why players needed to see a character undressing to progress the story, which I found tasteless, as there is almost no chance that a male or “less attractive” female character would have been portrayed in such a manner.
While some may dismiss this as a non-issue, I feel strongly that making content purely to titillate is wrong, and while there is a time and place for nudity in games, making almost every female character eye candy is offensive and for those who are prone to acting on their lust, dangerous.
Unfortunately, the developers aimed to cater to a certain demographic and succeeded. The most popular screenshot of the game on Steam was off the main character’s bottom, followed by the same picture (uploaded by different users) appearing several more times in the top ten most popular images for the game.
Fortunately, for people who want gaming to be a more progressive and less archaic hobby, most people seem uninterested in CYGNI: All Guns Blazing. With an all-time high of just 140 concurrent players on Steam, a daily peak of 7 concurrent players, and 0 players online as I am writing this review, CYGNI: All Guns Blazing appears nowhere in Epic Game Stores’ top 100 games despite being given away for free shortly after launch.
Cygni: All Guns Blazing is a action video game developed by KeelWorks and published by Konami, it was released on 6 August 2024 and retails for $29.99.
Cygni: All Guns Blazing is available on the following platforms: PC, Playstation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Cygni: All Guns Blazing is rated PEGI 7+ and contains:
CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is a passable twin-stick shooter/shoot’em up. It looks very pretty, but it is pretentious, overpriced, and oddly sexualised, making it impossible to recommend when so many better and frequently cheaper games are already available.
