SHIENRYU
SATURN
Reviewed by Malc

Shienryu can be considered very much a stock saturn shooter. There's an awful lot of them that look amost exactly the same. Sometimes even I have trouble in telling which one I'm playing! This one stands out slightly in that is just FEELS nice and arcadey - do you know what I mean?

Turn your telly on its side, to get that true vertical orientation, and the whole thing 'almost' comes together, with beautifully designed enemies and frantic gameplay, with a whole heap of bullets and kamikaze aliens bent on your destruction (that sounded awfully like box-copy eh;) Sometimes it's a quite uninvolved experience, with patches of calm interspersed with bonkers hard bits, but I managed to sail through it fairly quickly without really getting 'into' it. You know what I mean, glazed eyes, not really focused on the screen, going through the motions and wondering what to play next.

Still, you could do a hell of a lot worse that Shienryu, but the likes of DoDon Pachi beat it in terms of sheer manicness. A shootemup should involve your eyes, ears and reflexes 100%, Shienryu tries, but doesn't QUITE make it.

SCORE: 6/10 (I know it got 7 when I put it up, but I've just played DoDon Pachi again:)

Smart eh? I think he's the last boss in the game.

Standard stuff here - it begins to hot up when you meet...

Octy! Yes, swirly arms and dead hard, this boss may stump you for a while.

Getting better here graphics-wise, very Aleste-ish, with mecha-knight et al.

Your firepower gets even more powerful than this!

Very well done, but you probably have seen shots like this before - Layer Section?

And a very Raiden-esque weapon here, still, its fun to use.