BLUE REVOLVER

Good game.

As a casual and not too much of a hardcore SHMUP player, this game is absolutely amazing with its presentation, gameplay and customizability to each players' style.

The end stages' hypeness rivals with Touhou 7 PCB (My fav shmup of all time)'s end stages with the timing of the music and the bullet patterns that the games throw at you.

Absolute P E A K. I can't help but smile and hold my breath due to how epic stage 5 and the final boss were.

Not to mention, you can unlock more content i.e weapons, music, wallpaper, encouraging repeat playthroughs even more. I look forward to the day where I can 1cc this game in Hyper mode because this game is H Y P E.

literally the greatest shoot em up of all time.

I played this game a ton on my old class work pc so I bought it on my gaming pc expecting it to run just as well. But it totally chugs on this pc. And it only opens in big picture mode. I'm not even complaining like those hard core gamers where the game is a fraction of a second off and they claim its unplayable. The slow down is so bad that any lay man would clearly see that its running in super slow motion.

Easily one of the best in the genre. I don't recommend it to people new to the genre as it is a hard one to start with, but anyone that has more than a passing interest in the genre should own this.

Very nice.

Extraordinarily tight and fun STG. Very rewarding to learn 1cc and Score routes. Incredible Soundtrack! Been playing since before the Double Action update which only made the game better.

It's like a Cave shmup, except it's actually well made.

game good. follows the new modern shmup standard of syncing the OST to gameplay so you "play" an album. All around excellent, beginners to vets can enjoy the game with all the settings available. If my 9-year-old nephew can have fun with the game any noob can too.

you owe it to yourself to play this game if you like STG in any fashion it looks, sounds, and PLAYS incredibly well and has tons of fun features

My intro to shmups, I loved it. 1CC at 45 hours.

As a novice in the genre, this seems like a really great videogame

The goat of traditional shmups.
The presentation is absolutely great, with an awesome soundtrack (composers never miss in this genre I swear), very pleasant visuals that, while pixel art, manage to break away from the overused NES-esque color palettes, instead going for a much more colorful and bright palette, and very good art for the main menu and the empty space on the sides. The character designs (not just the poster girls, the others inside the bosses too) are also very nice. I wish there was more lore about them.

This game also fixes a big issue of mine with many games in the genre, which is that scoring is actually important to the game. Resources are tied to scoring, which further incentivises getting better at it. "But some games do the same!!!" yeah until you reach 60m points in the 4th stage and you no longer get anything more from it, making you switch to a much more careful and survival-focused playstyle half-way through.
Blue Revolver's scoring system never stops granting you resources. This, alongside being a very intuitive scoring system, is why this is the only shmup I've played where I've actually cared about scoring as much as getting a 1cc.
Also leaderboards are nice. Adds a competitive element to it.

Also the amount of visual customization is crazy. You can modify pretty much everything. The background is too light and won't let you see bullets clearly? You can tone it down. You don't like the colors of the bullets? You can change them. You think the game could use an old-monitor filter? Somehow there is one (although you have to unlock those).

And just like Touhou, it has pretty malleable difficulty levels, which means that even people who never played anything like this can have a fair shot at getting a 1cc.

If I had to say a negative about the game, it is that it is still yet another flying vehicles game with not that much bullet variety, but it is still pretty creative pattern-wise. Definitely on the upper end of the list in these regards. As I said, the color palette also helps it be more distinguishable from the rest.

Mission and XP mode are also very nice pieces of side content and I wish more shmups included stuff like this. The full 5-6 stages arcade run is fun and all, but man is it nice to have more stuff to do than just grinding that.

Peak game. Candidate for the best in the genre.

Blue Revolver didn't initially leave a very strong impression on me, but there's a lot of scoring depth here. Now I have 100 hours in it spread out over the last 4 years, and I'm still planning to put in several more obsessive week long grinds to up my PB by 5%.

guess I'm into shmups now whoops

Good shooting, good music.

She Blue on my Revolver til I Double Action

Before Blue Revolver, I was terrible at shmup/bullet hell games. After Blue Revolver, I still suck at them, but I don’t feel as bad.

My favorite shmup to this day. I love the speed and pacing of it. The resource and scoring system also pushes you to use your resources which is a good habit to take as a less experienced shmup player that I am. Tons of cool missions, excellent quality of life, 120fps mode, this game has everything.

Very good indie SHMUP!

I like it

10

This is my third Steam shmup after Mushihimesama and Crimzon Clover. And it indeed belongs to the same category as those gems. A labour of love from the devs (thank you Danbo!) and a wonderful experience for the player. It has a real distinct graphics style, an amazing soundtrack, a wide variety of characters and weapons, refined gameplay mechanics (with a balance to be found btw scoring and survival), increasingly challenging modes... Last but not least, it is available across multiple platforms with even a native Mac port :) An absolute must have.

very good very hard (I am bad at the videogame)

i hate shmups i want to go back to playing easy games that make me feel good

As one who is still slowly growing and learning on how to play Bullet Hell games, especially for one like me who plays SHMUP games, mainly coming in from R-Type series, this is that one game that I definitely recommend newcomers of the bullet hell genre, as it offers so much in letting you slowly get used to dodging the huge amounts of bullets, as well as learning on how you are supposed to look at the play areas during your gameplay session.

The common many normal people who may have heard of bullet hell and will recommend Touhou ( certain weebs I know for sure are like this ), though I believe Blue Revolver is the better take in recommending newcomers to enjoy the game.

So what else there is that you enjoy about the game?

my favorite shmup (in my 3 years of playing largely CAVE shmups)

PROS
- tight balance of pushing player to try the hard route while being forgiving for mistakes (at least when playing for survival)
- very nice rank system - rank feels earned and balanced - even as a bad player, I like trying to increase rank because it's just fun
- great music
- satisfying combo / scoring mechanic - even as a novice, I'm thinking about different routes to maximize score
- game encourages you to think about score, since extends are fairly regular - so score helps survival in a very tangible way
- missions are a great breather and sense of progress when feeling burned out on full run attempts (and I'm too lazy sometimes to train level-by-level). unlocks are another nice little progression thing. haven't touched XP Mode but that's another whole game mode to break things up.

CONS
- pretty quick to unlock all unlocks
- switching soundtracks is cool but you have to manually set the track for each scenario - i wish i could just say "when fighting boss, play a random one of original, double action, or remix of the boss music" so I could passively get to know all the versions (the music is good but i don't care enough to swap them out regularly)
- unlockable screen filters are unplayable for me - they mess with readability too much
- I have a hard time seeing some of the bullets - the very nice accessibility tweaks help here, but i like the base game's bullet colors, i don't want to mess with the palette
- anime voices

+Best quality of life features in any shmup.
+Amazing Difficulty balancing and progression.
+Great bullet patterns.
+Great Character gameplay variety.
+Great Music

All around great game and the dev dropped a great update too it.

as soon as I saw the DDP tank bridge 2 seconds into the game I was sold

and then the game continued to be good in basically every way it possibly could be, both in terms of content and features/polish

love to see it

One of the best shooting games on Steam. Lots of great features with the new update and super polished gameplay.

This game is hard as balls
Great soundtrack
Nice accessibility options

music = bop
gameplay = on top
game = not slop

A phenomenal shmup that is well put together and approachable. Quite challenging too; Even the easiest difficulty will prove to be quite the hurdle for a novice player. What surprised me the most going into the game was that, by default, there are no continues. There is free play you can enable but this prevents you from earning a number of achievements and being unable to save your high score after a run. As someone new to shmups this gradually shifted my attitude about the genre. It made me want to press on even if I made mistakes early on and see just how far I could get.

The amount of options is incredibly impressive, especially in the context of the Double Action update. Want to change the colour of the enemy bullets? You can do that. What to customize the wallpapers, even choosing which one you want on the left or right side of the screen? You can do that. Filters for the game? Color palettes for your ship? It's there. A number of accessibility options are also there if needed.

Scoring is great and it's part of what makes the game so fun. For the most part you shoot down 8 enemies and then switch to your special weapon to get a big bonus. Seeing all those point items floating down after dispatching a large mob of enemies is very satisfying. There's also plenty of chances for extra points with the Break bonuses; some of which can be tricky to get but pulling it off is always worth it.

Throughout my failed attempts, what helped keep me going was that amazing soundtrack; seriously one of the my favorites for a shmup. But having just one soundtrack wasn't enough, so instead, you have two options for each song out of the game with plenty of extras you can unlock. Speaking of which, having unlockables is very appreciated. It seems like a small thing but I like having something extra to shoot for beyond the obvious 1CC.

Blue Revolver is a special shmup; made with a lot of care and attention to detail. The Double Action update elevated what was already a great game. If you're new to the genre you might be inclined to go for something like Mushihimesama's novice mode first and that's perfectly fine. But after that? Once you've gotten used to it? Consider this game; because it's not one any shmup fan should be without.

One of my favorite 3 Shmups.

Excellent music.
Top tier bullet patterns.
Vibes for days.

Love this game.

Before this game I dont even play shmups, but this game make me interested in the genre and make me play the classics. None I love as much as Blue Revolver, for me the best for today standarts.

Very challenging, but it never feels unfair. Great OST and artstyle too! Wonderful if you like shmups.

I bought this long ago and loved it then. I've been dreaming of a 120+ FPS Pixel-based Shmup for ages. Something that matches the motion fluidity you get from old arcade SHMUPs on CRT. I can't believe it was added in. It's GLORIOUS. All the other new stuff is great as well.

This game makes my hands hurt and I like it. Seriously this is a modern shmup done right. I am fairly new to the whole bullet hell genre of shmups and this is an awesome introduction. Plenty of options for trying different approaches to the game and clearly lots of scoring depth. At the moment I'm having a lot of fun trying out the different pilots and different weapon load-outs. A killer soundtrack too that really drives the pace. Highly recommended.

Edit: also really loving the in game "store" that lets you unlock new art, music, skins, even game modes. It gives the game some extra replayability and is a feature that I miss from modern games as these sort of things have a way of becoming paid DLC in the AAA space. Major kudos for the developer making it a part of the game!

BLUE REVOLVER is a great feeling shoot-em-up with well-designed missions and features to help newer players learn

Wonderful color palette and soundtrack, frantic gameplay. Plenty of options for how to play, and unlocks and leaderboards keep me coming back.

Incredible game, one of the best in the genre and it just got a free update that made it even better.

Very nice SHMUP with a killer soundtrack.
Pretty hard, and you cannot continue without turning on cheats (At least initially, dunno if additional credits can be unlocked), so be ready for a challenge!

Sick shmup, with banger soundtrack(s), great style, lots of goals to strive for (multiple difficulties, unlocks, challenges, mission-mode etc) and fun and approachable scoring system. If you are pretty new to shmups like I was, even the easy (called normal ingame) is pretty hard but doable after some practice. The real challenge was beating regular mode (called hyper ingame), which took a while.

can we get more games like this instead of generic AAA slop? This is full of love and care and you can tell; the music and the overall aesthetic of the game is second to none, and that's not to say that this game doesn't have great gameplay too. if you like shmups this is a MUST play, but even if you don't play shmups, this is a super solid entry into the genre.

amazing game! just a heads-up for the devs/any players with a 1cc on parallel mode: it’s never too late to be a girl 💖

Grade A shmup. Don't see something this good that often.

First, I banged my head against Hyper Mode (The game's "intended" challenge) for a while just to see what it was all about and found it was brutal. So I moved down to Normal Moda, a mode being described as "for novices." It's definitely considerably easier than Hyper mode, but the fact that there are no credits means it's still a challenge because you are forced to 1cc it or nothing. (there is a way to Free Play, but it locks out some achievements, I suppose??? Not everyone cares about that.)

Either way in Normal Mode the game eases up a little and I was able to learn what it's all about. The game essentially forces you to interact with its scoring mechanics if you want to get extends / extra lives. I consider this a good thing, personally. Interacting with scoring mechanics often gives games an identity of their own and having them be nearly optional takes away from that, I feel. I play most games for survival, but here learning the scoring mechanics is part of survival in a much more pronounced way than other shmups that grant extends for meeting certain score thresholds. It might seem overwhelming at first but it's just a matter of getting the hang of it.

With that in mind I'd say Normal Mode isn't so much purely for novices, but a fair challenge for people who don't consider themselves amazing at the genre but have some experience. However, It's probably quite challenging for someone who's just getting started, but that's just a guess because I can't have that experience anymore. So if you're a complete newbie keep that in mind.

After about five hours of total playtime I 1cc'd normal mode (maybe two of which have been trying and failing to get past the third stage boss in Hyper Mode.) And now, when I play Hyper Mode, I have a much easier time than before too, and I can see myself 1cc'ing that as well.

I also gotta talk about the game's legibility options. I wish every shmup had this. Depending on how hard you find keeping track of the important bits in the chaos you can turn your own bullets transparent, make medal pick-ups transparent, make the background darker or desaturate it. You can also color the bullets whichever way you want. This doubles as an accessibility feature for color blind people. Me? I just colored my bullets green and orange, ZeroRanger style. It works surprisingly well with the game's colors.

There's also a bunch of stuff to unlock. There's art, alternate colors for the three available ships, visual filters and remixes of the game's music you can set in the options to play instead of the original music. You can also unlock weapons for the game's XP Mode. Which is pretty much an Arrange mode that remixes the mechanics.

But yeah, it's great. If you like shmups you'll love this. If you're not yet but are interested in the genre, I encourage you to try out Blue Revolver, it might just grab you.

The recent Double Action update brought this game from a solid shmup to a genre defining classic that will go down in history as a landmark foundational title, one of the best that should be played by anyone with even a passing interest in the genre.

Top recommendation winter '24.
The game was already a great cave homage, but they came through and polished EVERYTHING.

Choosing between art and music in the unlock shop is harder than novice mode.

The game is great. Is clearly a passion project. I just beat the game in normal. But I'm going to keep playing.
-Amazing presentation.
-Awesome music.
-Super depth gameplay.
-4 game modes.
-Missions to learn the game.
-It has 120hz framerate option. Super rare in a shmup.
-Great linux versión.
-A lot of options to modify the colors of the game.

Blue Revolver is an incredible shmup with a vast variety of playstyles, customizability and style both in its graphical presentation and its fantastic soundtrack. I really wish this genre wasn't so overlooked and underappreciated, but I'm always glad to see that no matter how niche a genre may be, there will still be passionate devs around the world ready to push that genre forward and evolve it to inspire others to do the same. Give it a shot!!