Konami is best known for franchises like Silent Hill, Metal Gear, Bomberman, and Contra, but it has drawn quite a bit of ire for how it has treated them over the past decade. That said, the storied Japanese game developer and publisher has been on a bit of a rebound recently. It’s reviving its older franchises with collections and brand new games like Contra: Operation Galuga and Super Bomberman R 2 and publishing some quality indie-level games like Skelattack and Super Crazy Rhythm Castle. Cygni: All Guns Blazing finds the middle ground between those two things and is Konami’s best game in years because of that.
Cygni is the first game from KeelWorks, a Scottish indie studio, but it’s also a flashy shoot-’em-up that wouldn’t feel out of place in an arcade. It stands alongside classic Konami sci-fi shoot-’em-ups like Gradius while also providing its own unique takes on the genre. While Gradius is a side-scroller, Cyngi plays out from a top-down view, Galaga-style. Players control an ace pilot as they assist Earth’s forces in fighting against a biomechanical species of aliens that humans awakened on the titular planet of Cygni. While gameplay certainly takes precedence over narrative, it still has some interesting themes regarding the environmental impact of war and colonization in the brief cutscene snippets between levels.
Cygni is still quite enjoyable if you ignore the lore, though. Each level plays out as a visual story of its own, with distinct acts that shake up what players are doing. That should satisfy players who want to engage with this game on a deeper level, although your eyes should also be glued to the shoot-’em-up action taking place on screen. Players can shoot at what’s in front of them and fire off missiles, and they have a limited number of hits their shield can take before dying. Cygni sets itself apart by giving players a bit more control over where they shoot.
Not only can players orient the front-facing fire on slight angles, but by using a secondary weapon, players can fire toward the ground as well. This gives Cygni a sense of depth that most shoot-’em-ups from this perspective just don’t have, and it also made me pay more attention to the beautifully animated background of each level. KeelWorks has experience in 3D animation, and that became abundantly clear as I saw battles between humanity and robotic alien creatures disturbed from eternal slumber. If this were the 1980s, each of these levels would probably be its own game, but here, it’s all one package.
It’ll take players a while to master, too. In anything higher than its Easy difficulty, Cyngi provides a thorough and unforgiving challenge if you aren’t closely monitoring your ship’s position and keeping track of how much shield you have left. You’ll die a lot, but part of the fun of this genre is getting to play the same level over and over again to rack up a higher score. It doesn’t have the accessibility features of a retro throwback like Volgarr the Viking 2 and instead opts for the sink-or-swim approach of its inspiration. If you’re struggling, I’d recommend setting the difficulty to easy to learn the levels and then slowly increase it over time.
Cygni is a textbook case of a classic gaming genre being modernized on current platforms. That’s a niche that feels surprisingly apt for Konami, which right now is focused on reviving, remastering, or remaking games from its older franchises. Cygni approaches that idea from the opposite direction, potentially creating a new franchise for Konami that harks back to when the company was at its peak. While upcoming Konami games like Silent Hill 2’s remake and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater will also need to be great for this company to restore its reputation, this is a creative step in the right direction.
Cygni: All Guns Blazing is available now for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5.
