Matthew Bailey“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.
Bullet
was one of our favourite games last year and over the last few months has become one of the boy’s absolute favourite games to play. today we are going to be looking at the expansion Bullet
that I played here with Jack(9) as well as a brief chat about the wooden tokens that you can get as a deluxe upgrade. it’s not often that I cover expansions but as this is one of the boy’s favourite games I thought it was worth featuring again.
We also have 2 promo characters in Beethoven and Anne-Clare Forthwith that we have yet to open and are saving for a rainy day.
Equally, when I reviewed Bullet it was extremely hard to buy but now that the late pledge is open for the Kickstarter I wanted to make people aware as I know a few people were unable to buy at the time. Imagination Gaming also has stock of both base games now as well as the expansion.
Just the New stuff for people familiar with the series
Bullet is an expansion pack that gives you four new heroines to play with from four different licensed Japanese shmups. while these are not essential if you are a big fan of the game then I would recommend adding these to your heroin pool. With Sora being a personal favourite as you can change her weapon on the fly which affects your character ability. The bosses are also unique and add some decent variation to the cooperative mode. The Forest Witch is a favourite of ours who clears go to the centre instead of the incoming.
One thing worth saying is I actually think the “easy” heroines in Bullet are easier for kids than the Heroines in Bullet and if I was starting from scratch or when we finally get to Henry(2) playing I would use one of these heroines first.
Equally, the one tokens are really nice and a fantastic upgrade over the cardboard ones. I appreciate “deluxified” tokens are not for everyone I am a firm believer that any game where you need to regularly pull tokens blindly out of a bag is always improved by upgraded tokens the aren’t going to get damaged over time. the wooden ones are lovely and really add to the feel of the game. again not essential but if you are a fan of the game I would recommend picking these up.
Review of Bullet overall
The Bullet series is based on the video game genre Shmups. “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.
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. This is a fun variant that we have played a fair bit as well over the last few months and the boys were just as excited to play this as the competitive version and often the bosses have unique mechanics that make the game different each time.
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.
Bullet recently had a Kickstarter to back all of their previous stuff along with some new expansions and the late pledges for this are now open (hence why I waited until now to feature this).
https://www.level99store.com/collections/bullet-universe-pledge-manager
Please note shipping is from the USA.
Bullet & Bullet★ (base games) and Bullet (expansion) are all currently available in limited quantities in the UK (links below).
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 yet more heroines to play with and we await the arrival of the extra Kickstarter heroines with bated breath. Time to unleash the 2 promo ones the next time we play.
“Bullet” was kindly provided by “Level 99 Games” for the purpose of review. Crystal Tsui who works for Level 99 Games is in our community and I consider her a friend. Our thoughts and opinions are, however, our own.
