#shoot em up
4cr Plays - Gleylancer (PS4)
We live now in the era of the remaster, where older games are released for new audiences with a fresh coat of paint - often updated to appear sharp on an HD display. Often, this treatment has been applied to games that came out one or two generations ago, bringing early 3D games into the modern era.
Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer is an interesting outlier in this trend. This 1992 shoot-em-up was originally released in Japan for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, and did not make it into other parts of the world until 2008, when it appeared on the Wii Virtual Console. Even then, the surprisingly-long story scenes were in Japanese.
Now, Ratalaika Games has re-released Gleylancer on basically every modern system - translated into English, and with HD visuals.
The plot of Gleylancer follows Ensign Lucia Cabrock after the outbreak of war between humans and an alien fleet in 2025. Lucia’s father is captured by the aliens, and she sets out to rescue him with a hijacked prototype fighter - the titular Gleylancer.
Honestly, the story doesn’t really matter as anything other than mild motivation for the gameplay. Gleylancer is a horizontal shoot-em-up in the vein of something like Fantasy Zone. You can move your ship freely in any direction in a 2D plane, and can attack the enemy ships with your guns. If you get hit, it’s lights out. You can gain a little bit of protection, but to complete the game, you will need fast reflexes.
The Gleylancer can move at four different speeds, as toggled by the player. You can switch between different weapons by picking up pods dropped by enemies. These weapons include a basic gun that fires double blue laser pulses, a weapon that fires twin piercing laser arcs, one that shoots an arc of five purple pulses with good range but low fire rate, one that shoots fireballs, and more.
You can acquire up to two weapons at once. Both will be of the same basic type, with subsequent weapon pick-ups overwriting both. However, you can choose how these two weapons behave. In the normal mode, both fire in the direction the ship is moving (though, they can be locked in a direction with a toggle). In the reverse mode, the guns fire in the opposite direction of ship movement. In search mode, the guns automatically aim at the nearest enemy. In the multi mode, each weapon swivels in a 180 degree arc on the top or bottom of the ship. In the shadow mode, the weapons imitate every motion of the ship at a short delay. Finally, in the roll mode, the weapons spin around the ship at 180 degrees from each other. This gives you a wild, spiral pattern with good coverage of the screen, but low accuracy. This enables quite a bit of customization of how you play, adding some fun and replayability to the game.
Gleylancer is a fairly short game - only 11 stages - but poses a decent challenge. A “rewind” feature allows you to quickly roll back from a mistake, if you want to try the game, but are concerned about it being too difficult.
I’m not a huge connoisseur of the shmup genre. I can’t tell you all of the nuances that separate Gleylancer from other famous shooters. However, I did have some fun playing it. Beyond the gameplay, however, I have to say that Gleylancer is a feast for the eyes and ears. The pixel art in Gleylancer is gorgeous. The ships and monsters are detailed and interesting, and the artwork is crisp and colorful in HD. It looks fantastic. It sounds even better. This game has a killer soundtrack.
If you’re looking for a shooter to play this weekend, Gleylancer is a great way to kill a few hours - and you might find yourself humming the soundtrack even longer.
A copy of the game was provided for this review.
I need more MetroidVania, Platformers, RPGs, and Shmups in my life on Nintendo systems up to the Wii and 3DS. What are some of your more obscure or hidden gems?
