HORGIHUGH / ホーギーヒュー - Normal Mode ALL Clear (No-Miss) - 822,200
74Horgihugh is a doujin shmup that was released on Steam recently.
It's a pretty cute horizontal shmup that has a lot of nods to classic shmups like Gradius, Salamander, Fantasy Zone and Twinbee.
The music is also composed by Motoaki Furukawa, who is known for composing the music in Gradius II, Salamander and other popular titles like Metal Gear and Policenauts.
Main mechanic of this game is the buddy system. Which is basically an option you can position to the right, left, top and bottom of yourself. You get the buddy after collecting four powerups.
You also have a loop-the-loop and a flash bomb indicated by the blue and yellow bars in the top-left respectively. You can use these once a bar is filled up.
A loop-the-loop gives you temporarily invincibility and does some damage to enemies it touches. The bar for it fills pretty quickly so you can use it pretty often.
The flash bomb is more your traditional bomb, it gives you a screen clear. The bar for this fills much slower.
You power up in this game by collecting medals. These medals are dropped from certain enemies and are dropped by a carrier that comes in certain time intervals. Progression is always the same. Every medal gives you in order:
- Bomb, which is your standard Gradius missile.
- Twinshot
- Twinbomb
- Buddy
- Missile, a secondary missile shot.
- Buddybomb
Destroying enemies makes them drop blue cube fragments, which you can use to also buy additional upgrades in Howard's Lab. This is a blimp that shows up in certain spots in stages.
Unlike Fantasy Zone though, you keep these upgrades until you die. With the exception of the buddy upgrades, you keep these even if you die.
The upgrades you mostly want are the Photon Laser, the Buddy upgrades, Bomb Type Spread and the Shield. Photon Laser is easily the strongest shot in the game and it also pierces walls and enemies.
When you die you lose all your powerups and it's actually quite hard to recover because you lose an insane amount of power. So this is mostly a one-life game.
The game isn't terribly hard once you know what to do and you keep your powerups. Would like to see a Hard Mode implemented at some point.
The game has an infinite score problem, which is very unfortunate. Bosses don't time out and you can milk their projectiles for points forever. I milked one boss for like 10 minutes before saying fuck it and moving on. Hoping this gets fixed at some point.
Buy the game on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1046980/HORGIHUGH/
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