Matthew BaileyAs someone who is incredibly passionate about both board games and video games, today’s game is a fantastic amalgamation of two of my main passions.
“Shmups” (short for “shoot-em-ups”) are games where you scroll up the screen, avoiding enemy bullets and shooting at enemies. Back in the 80s, this was one of the main genres in the arcade. In modern times, these are now a fairly niche genre, still popular in Japan. They often feature anime females and characters as part of the design, and my particular favourite sub-genre is bullet hell games, where the game is more about dodging patterns of enemy bullets than necessarily accurately shooting back.
As such, today’s game is “Bullet
” based on that very niche genre of video games. Played with Jack(.8.) and Toby(5).
“Bullet” is a tile-clearing cascade puzzle game where each player chooses a heroine that comes with a multitude of different abilities. You start the game with an empty grid, and at the beginning, around you draw a number of bullets out of a bag, starting with four; this increases each round, meaning that things start to get pretty frantic a few rounds in. Each bullet is a number and a colour, and what you have to do is place the bullets in the corresponding coloured column, the number of blank spaces down related to the number of the bullet.
Where the gameplay comes in, though, is while doing this; you can use pattern abilities to remove bullets from the grid by lining them up in specific patterns as per your character deck.
In order to facilitate this, your character has a number of abilities that you can spend energy on to get the bullets to line up correctly. If you clear a starred bullet, you also gain extra energy, which is really useful when you are scrambling around trying to clear bullets and avoid getting hit. All of this happens in real time, which means there is very little waiting around. In the rules of the game, you do this under a fairly stringent three-minute time limit. As I was playing with younger boys, we negated using the timer, but I did play a later solo game, and it definitely adds to the tension as you frantically try to arrange the bullets to clear them, scrambling to get those extra energy points so that you can draw another card and hopefully clear another line.
Because you can use abilities and lay bullets in any order, this then becomes a fairly complex puzzle of trying to work out the optimum way to lay the bullets and the best bullets to remove to ensure that none reach the bottom of your grid.
If they do, you get hit, with the last player alive winning in the competitive game.
There is also a cooperative version where you play against a character’s boss deck, jointly trying to defeat the main boss while avoiding bullets yourself. I have not played this with the boys yet, but we played the competitive game twice, and we intend to play the cooperative version in the next week or so.
What makes the game unique and makes you want to play again are the different heroines that offer a variety of different game styles. Interestingly, different heroines are ranked from easy to hard in terms of how easy they are to pilot. Of the three characters we played, one of them simply allowed you to hold an extra card; another gave you two Sniper tokens, and these extra tokens featured strongly in the way that patterns worked, and another character started with half health but had a number of different shields and regeneration mechanisms. As soon as we finished playing the game, the boys were desperate to play again with a different heroine this time.
All three of us absolutely loved this. While I admit I was drawn in by the theme, the boys equally thought this was excellent. It is the right amount of thinking and the tension you get when you are desperately scrambling to find a way to clear more bullets so you don’t die that I haven’t felt playing games in a while.
There are not many other games like this, and it most reminds me of playing something like Tetris or Lumines.
The difference in complexity of the different characters means that we were able to play this even with Toby, and while there is a small amount of reading, the icons make it pretty easy to understand what you’ve got to do after you’ve played through it once.
This is definitely going to stay part of my collection, You can purchase “Bullet” currently from Imagination Gaming, but they have just released a “Bullet Universe” Kickstarter where you can buy some new expansions and a reprint, along with “Bullet★,” which is essentially the same but with more heroines.
You can however order “Bullet★” from a few places below and this is essentially the same game but with a different selection of heroines.
An odd point, but if you go looking online, you will sometimes see it written as “Bullet Heart,” but usually (and correctly) it is written as “Bullet.”
Level 99 are aware of stock issues in the UK and are working to sort out supply chains and improve this.
This gets a very strong recommendation from me, and its solo mode is also extremely good and is definitely something I am going to invest more in. Plus, the boys are desperate for more heroines to play with. We got 2 promo characters, including a cat, which we are going to play with next time.
“Bullet” and 2 promos were kindly provided by “Level 99 Games” for the purpose of review. Our thoughts and opinions are, however, our own.
