Rip through waves of enemies with your amazing aircraft while the command center JUST WON'T SHUT UP.

There are many things that people will say in their lives, but I'm pretty sure "I play shoot-em-ups for their story" is not among those things.

Raiden V Director's Cut is a shoot-em-up game developed by MOSS and published worldwide by UFO Interactive (Japan's publishing is handled by MOSS). It is part of the beloved Raiden series that started back in 1990 on arcades.

Graphics

The 3D graphics are great and well fleshed out, special effects are amazing and it is really satisfying to see the bosses explode in spectacular fashion.

Being how varied the settings are, sometimes bullets are really hard to see; the situation gets worse when the background is moving really fast. This tends to be really distracting and makes the game a lot less enjoyable.

I would have preferred less background saturation and movement in favour of better playability.

Setup and Performance

Installing the game via Steam is absolutely painless, performance is good, I didn't notice any major frame drop with high resolution.

Sound

The sound design is excellent, sounds have good quality and play without latency.

Music is very good, although some themes tend to feel generic and bring down the perceived value of the game.

Gameplay

The gameplay is the classic vertical scrolling shoot-em-up that we all know, with some twists that are more or less welcome to the game.

A great plus is the possibility to choose your fighter and being able to choose how your 3 weapons will fire, with 3 modes each. This increases replayability and adds a welcome layer of customization and variety.

The "lives" system is replaced with a "shield bar", this allows the players to endure more than one hit without losing their score. This is countered by having only one "life" before being asked to "continue" and lose your score.

"Flash Point" is another welcome addition, it is merely a score multiplier that slowly depletes if you don't kill enemies. It is a huge help when it comes to leaderboard positioning, since this game features a multiplayer component.

The multiplayer component is further boosted by the "Cheer System", allowing players to "cheer on others" when an achievement is unlocked. Cheers increase your "Cheer Call", which can be used when you find yourself in a tight situation: all enemy bullets are cancelled and sub-weapons are temporarily boosted.

Compared to the other Raiden game I played (Raiden II), there is only one type of screen-clearing bomb that does a generic explosion with some rays. This deeply disappoints the 10-year-old inside of me.

Extra: Story

Here is the biggest complaint I have about this game. As soon as I start the game, I am welcomed by what slowly reveals itself to be a humongous wall of text . With voice acting too.

I have no issues with explaining what is going on, or even having a plot in a shoot-em-up, but you can only go so far without getting ridiculous.

The game features multiple endings, which can be seen as both a positive and a negative: multiple endings increase replayability, but also add to a game that could benefit from simplification.

The whole game features the command center commenting on your performance and talking, talking, talking and talking and TALKING all the time.

My ears beg for the sweet relief of silence (or a miraculous case of selective deafness): the chatter is extremely distracting and this reflects on gameplay, making me try to do two things at once and ending up doing both of them terribly.

Conclusion

I played Raiden II when I was a little kid, and I loved every second of it.

I want to love this game. I want to love it so badly it's not even funny.

But I just can't.

The graphics are great, although bullets are not "evident enough" in my opinion, negatively affecting gameplay. Sound is overall very good.

There are great steps forward in gameplay: the shield gauge, the "flash point" system... Even the "Cheer System" finds its place if you want to participate (you can opt out of it).

Having only one bomb type is sad though, it's not a huge thing but I always liked how the two aircrafts were well-distinguished in Raiden II, both by color and bomb types.

The story may be interesting too, but I literally cannot understand any of it: the initial wall of text was so overbearing I just skipped it and the chit-chat from the command center is supposed to be a system to deliver some plot, but guess what?

I can't listen! I'm shooting down enemies that are not really happy to see me!

The plot is overbearing and violently shoved down your throat without any respect for your braincells and your desperate trials to have fun.

No funny or smart references to the game in the score explanation today. I'm mad.

62/100

Thank you for reading.

Penaz.