Loli StarFox
Touhou in the Sky

These are how I would describe Mirage Feathers. If it was 1980, I'd expect to find this game in an arcade, surrounded by twenty youths shouting and cheering as the player skirts and weaves their way through a hail of enemy fire and blasts the stage boss with missiles and lasers, all while jamming music blares out of the machine's speakers.

The story mode is relatively short, but sincere. A brief introduction to the characters is promptly followed by emotional events and then you're thrust into the meat of the gameplay. It's not complex, by any means, but, whoever said a good story has to be?

The gameplay itself is also quite simple, but it's one of those 'easy to learn, difficult to master' games. The speed, enemy numbers and their attack patterns, music; everything this game throws at you can be summed up in a single word: intense. You're screen is going to quickly become filled not just with things to shoot, but what they're shooting at you. Even on the easiest difficult, this game is no cake-walk, and unless you have the reflexes of a Jedi Master, you're probably going to take hits. Often. Fortunately, most weapons have a fair degree of auto-aiming, so you can focus on trying not to get hit while letting your weapons find their mark on their own. That isn't to say you don't still have to aim.

Once you've completed the Story Mode, you unlock Endless Mode, in which stages are thrown at you randomly, and difficulty continues to increase. Story mode has credits you can use to continue, when you run out of lives. Endless mode does not. However, if you're good enough, you can acquire more lives as you rack up points. You also get random upgrades to choose from, periodically, giving Endless Mode something of a Roguelike aspect. No two runs will ever be quite the same. Obviously, as the name suggests, there is no end to Endless Mode, except for running out of lives or quitting. Challenge yourself. See how far you can get. Reach for the highest point count to hold above your head as bragging rights.

And now for the negatives. These aren't bad things, per se, and certain not game breaking, but they are things to consider.

There is only one character to play as. While a game like this doesn't really -need- multiple characters, it's always nice to have the option to choose, even if only for aesthetic purposes. I hope that should this game get a sequel, a couple more characters will be added, possibly even with different mechanics or abilities to give the overall gameplay another level of difficulty or change.

Given the rapid pace of the game, and the high number of entities on screen at any given time, I often felt like I was having a hard time seeing... anything. The screen can quickly become filled with enemies and projectiles, all moving at a high pace, sometimes making it difficult to track enemies and their projectiles, resulting in a cramped and cluttered view. This would lead me to feel like my field of view was extremely tiny and limited, or result in a struggle to evade and dodge everything adequately, resulting in taking unnecessary hits.

There are no breaks in the Story Mode. When beginning a game, you are given the option to spend points to upgrade your capabilities. However, during gameplay of the Story Mode, each stage leads into the next. If you want to spend your points to improve yourself, you need to manually exit to the main menu, and then re-enter Story Mode in order to access this option. You don't really lose anything for doing this, but it is a minor inconvenience and somewhat immersion breaking.

As stated above, even Easy difficulty can be difficult. I won't claim to be good at games, and my own reflexes are no doubt less than optimal, but I would still consider Easy to be... less than stated. I had to actively evade and dodge constantly, and even still took what I'd consider far too many hits. Over the course of some fifteen stages, I lost numerous lives and 'continued' twice. I'm certain that with many more hours of practice, I could do a lot better, but... not matter how you look at it, there's no getting around it; you can not slack off, or you will get shot down.

If you like fast paced, arcade style aerial bullets hells with cute little girls, I strongly recommend Mirage Feathers. If you're unsure, give the demo a try, first.

I give this game nine DANDELIONS out of ten. But, I'm biased.



And, no. There's nothing sexual about the girls. At least, not in the game...

Peak

Aerial Combat Gal cripples national military on journey to find other Aerial Combat Gal: The Game

This is a fairly short but very good game, the main weapons are all fun to use, the enemies are rampant, some of the attacks from em are pretty clever and the music ain't so bad either.
It's definitely not the go-to prime choice of shoot-em-up, the story is a bit choppy in pacing at times (also the design for the main character is questionable, I'll say that, there is a toggle for it in the settings thankfully) but for the asking price I'd say it's pretty good all in all.



IMPORTANT NOTE: Please mind the bridges.