Hazelnut Hex - Hard Mode 1cc - 4,382,250 Points (1-Miss)
134Turn on captions for some extra commentary during the video.
Hazelnut Hex is a new indie arcade-style shoot 'em up from chunderfins that came out on Switch and itch.io recently.
The game has a very nice art style, 2D animation and plenty of hot jams.
As a shmup it's also really good with a legit scoring system that's really fun to try and optimize.
Difficulties:
The game has two difficulties, Normal and Moderate.
Moderate is a bit of a misleading name, but it's definitely harder than Normal. Enemies are far more aggressive and fire more bullets.
Moderate is mostly better for score since more bullets means bigger bullet cancels.
Lives and bombs:
You start the game with 3 lives and get extends every 500k points. Getting hit makes you lose one level of power and your option.
Bombs are accumulated from gathering star items. Enemies drop more star items if you kill them with high multipliers. You can carry a maximum of 6 bombs at a time.
Shots:
The game has three shottypes; A, B and C.
C seems by far the best shot since the wide shot covers most of the screen and can get most of the popcorn this way. A forward focus shot is not really necessary since the charge shot covers most of that need.
The charge shot is a strong piercing projectile that cancels bullets in its wake. You charge it up by not shooting for a couple of seconds and it also serves as the main scoring mechanic of the game.
Scoring:
- Every subsequent enemy you kill with the same charge shot increases the multiplier with which their base score value gets multiplied. So ideally you want to line up low value enemies first and kill the high value enemy at the end.
- Powerup item medaling. After reaching max power, the nuts will start at 1000 points and increase by 100 for every you pick up. These can go up to 6000+ points in long stages and reset back to 1000 if you get hit.
- Bullet cancels during a bomb give 100 points for each bullet cancelled. Want to use bombs during high bullet intensive patterns. Bosses also shoot a single big spray of bullets when you get them down to a certain health threshold. This is telegraphic with a sound effect and is basically your cue to bomb.
- Stars give +50 points and enemies spawn more if you kill them with high multipliers.
Besides that there are also stage end bonuses:
- Max Hit Bonus: Not totally sure but might be related to the chains you got.
- Max Cancel Bonus: Highest bullet cancel x2. You want to always bomb at least once per stage to get this bonus.
- Damage Bonus: 20k for no-miss (30k in stage 5) with less points for each hit.
- Sam Bonus: 20k if you still have the option squirrel at the end of a stage.
The chaining is quite fun, but for how much the system depends on precise trick shots it's also somewhat maddening how much randomness there is in many enemy waves. There are many enemies that move in random directions or have a random vertical spawn point, so chaining there becomes a bit of a crapshoot and score can vary a lot between good and bad luck.
4.5 million is probably possible in this.
The death in stage 5 was pretty painful.
Buy the game here:
https://chunderfins.itch.io/hazelnut-hex
00:00 - Intro
00:41 - Stage 1
03:49 - Stage 2
07:58 - Stage 3
11:36 - Stage 4
15:56 - Stage 5
21:55 - Ending
23:26 - Credits
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