Note: video review embedded below.

Revolver360 is, at a glance, complete and absolute absurdity. Picture a bullet hell shooter drenched in futuristic neon blue which fully rotates at the press of a button, existing in three dimensions as you fly sideways through waves of enemies while trying to keep up with the madness on screen.

The number of systems and mechanics at work at any given time in Revolver is in itself intimidating, which when paired with its genre-typical difficulty level and the added intensity of a third dimension, can feel like borderline excess for the sake of it. But Revolver pulls it all off because underneath the inscrutable exterior there’s a very deep, developed formula at work, all focused around an elaborate shooting and scoring system that is only as invasive as you want it to be.

Different types of shots affect different enemies, various meters are raised by particular stimuli, and multiple paths through levels create even more room for experimentation. Revolver fully commits itself to being as complex and unique as possible within the capabilities of its systems, and while this means it’s likely the least accessible shoot’em’up I’ve played in a very long time, its desire to nurture and expand the boundaries of advanced play feels like a justified trade off.

Revolver expresses this best in its challenge mode, which features 50 quick, extremely focused missions which give you a specific task to complete in a short period of time. To me these felt less like fun bonuses to the main game, but rather a comprehensive tutorial detailing the minutia of Revolver’s intricate mechanics and how best to use them. This is accomplished through the challenges themselves, and also the contextual hint system which drip feeds you information in a way that is much easier to parse given you can immediately apply it to an appropriate situation.

Returning to Revolver’s main stages after completing a number of these, I was surprised just how much more I understood about the game I had already beaten once, and how significantly more capable that had made me where simply reading a manual and playing the game had not. I also began to appreciate all the little things I hadn’t even noticed before, like the finer points of the scoring system or how to best utilize the rotation feature to line up enemies, which further solidified in me the idea that Revolver had fully thought through each of its mechanics and the interplay that develops between them. The more I was able to understand the more I enjoyed playing, and it made me wish that other games would be as thorough in their initiations.

But even if you aren’t interested in getting deep into Revolver’s metagame it’s still a fascinating beast of a bullet hell shooter to play around with. Rotating your ship is an ingenious hook that somehow never manages to feel clumsy or obscure important information (an even more impressive task when put up against Revolver’s brainmelting cyberpunk visual style).

It’s a “cool” that didn’t need explaining; a “cool” which leaked out of the screen like a kettle getting ready to blow its top and told me that I better get ready. And then the game started and all pretenses of restraint evaporated as Revolver boldly declared that it wasn’t going to settle for being just enough shoot’em’up and neither should you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW_Tr5E-yts
You can read more of my writing on Kritiqal.

An unique and quite challenging shmup with a twist. Literally. Being able to rotate the entire screen as you play, and honestly if you don't do that, you might as well consider yourself dead from the beginning. I consider myself lucky for completing it on my 3rd try, especially considering how panic inducing the last boss's patterns were.

Speaking of which, all the bullets and just the entire game is so glowy, that it's really difficult to read some patterns especially on the last boss, but I'll forgive it since the game as a whole was amazing. Also it ran at a perfect constant 60fps at 3840x2160 resolution on a laptop, so i feel it's quite well optimized.

Hoping we'll see more games from this creative dev...

Bullet hell never looked so good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqNcLbvF7MM

Don't be put off by the "bullet hell" tag, this is closer to Ikaruga or Gradius V than Cave games, meaning you can be decent at it without devoting your life to it.
+ The music is great in that slightly cheesy video game way. You will lose it everytime the bassdrum kicks in in level 1
+ Visually dazzling
+ Makes you feel like a boss everytime you pull off a nice combo
+ Challenge mode and Sector Dive allow you to get better at the game without committing to a full run

- Some people think It's too short (I don't)
- Not recommended for people who can't stand the color blue

Revolver 360 is an STG (or "Shmup") that is innovative in its mechanics whilst remaining respectful to the classics and fundamentals of the genre. To summarise, Revolver 360 is a 2.5D STG taking place in 4 stages, with branching paths and bosses at the end of each level. The player shoots enemies and objects coming from all directions in a 3D plane whilst moving within a rotatable cylindrical playing field. Bullets can be rotated-around and cancelled through abilities which use up constantly-recharging resources. The scoring system is based around cancelling bullets and enemy chaining (although the chaining is not nearly as strict as games like Dodonpachi, which is notorious for its perfection-demanding enemy chaining). There are also 50 short challenge levels which test the player's knowledge of the different game mechanics, as well as their memorisation.

As someone who usually plays STGs for survival and tends not to care about getting high scores, the scoring system in Revolver 360 is so addictive that it has gotten me hooked and trying to improve my scores regularly in spite of my preferences for survival play.

The scoring system is based around two multipliers: a first multiplier which is based on chaining enemy destruction, it is capped at X16, although this limit can temporarily be broken through using overdrive mode; the second multiplier is a count of how many bullets you have cancelled. Bullets are cancelled through destroying enemies as they are firing lasers, using your ship's own lasers, or using the emp shot (a powerful charge shot which breaks through blue beams which lasers cannot cancel) and overdrive, which cancels all bullets on screen once activated. Larger enemies fire more bullets at lower health, so the player has to be careful to leave them on as little health as possible to cancel as many bullets as possible. The effect this has on the gameplay is that it encourages players to be constantly taking risks, as it requires them to rotate clouds of bullets directly towards them to cancel them out with a well-timed/positioned laser cancel. The nature of the first multiplier encourages players to mix up their main shot (which works as you would expect from a basic STG shot type) and their laser for the most optimal chaining. This combined with the fact that there are many routes to take throughout the meticulously-crafted and gorgeous levels (there are even secret routes!) means that there is a ton of player freedom and replay value.