Take one look at any shmup in full flow and it's no wonder that this remains the most intimidating of genres; cascading curtains of bullets, flotillas of enemy ships and somewhere, almost imperceptible, in all that chaos is you, the lone fighter ship taking on impossible odds. You can trace the genre back to the inky black void of the arcade from which modern video games were born, from Space Invaders to Scramble to R-Type, and sometimes all that's seemed to have really changed is those odds you face have become greater and greater still. Stare into the face of a modern shmup, and it can seem like so much colourful noise.
When you're in on the secret, though, these can be some seriously sublime games, and there's probably been no better game to lift the veil on all that brilliance than Danmaku Unlimited, which saw its third installment recently release on the Switch. It's a game cast in the diamond cut, hard-edged mold of Toaplan and its successor Cave's 'bullet hell' games - 'danmaku' translates from Japanese to English as 'barrage' - while it's also infused with the doujin spirit of devs such as Kenta Cho and Hikoza T Ohkubo. Danmaku Unlimited is, effectively, the work of a single developer - one Sunny Tam - and it's a game that benefits from that more personal touch.
To play Danmaku Unlimited is to be in the presence of a learned enthusiast who's keen to share their passion with you - it's a game that goes to great lengths to open the thrill of the shmup to all. It's like spending an afternoon with a persuasive friend, taking you through everything that makes the genre special and laying it all out in simple, easy to parse terms, and all that warm enthusiasm is infectious after a while.
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