#witchbeam

The original version spent years in Early Access and it’s evident in how well constructed it is. Every stage is finely tuned and gave me just the right amount of friction to keep me constantly engaged. The number of enemies and bullets, the dynamic stage phases, and the amount of hits bosses take--each of these are pushed to the edge of unmanageable without really feeling overwhelming.

Special attention should be paid to the stage and character design, which put Assault Android Cactus far above its peers. Stages go through several phases as you fight through its waves of enemies. A moving elevator might land on several floors, gaps might be created or filled to create chokepoints and open areas, or parts of the stage might begin rotating. Each stage sets up and explores a unique idea, some almost feeling as if they contain two or three levels in their own right. Each level has its own arc of tension and release, balancing moments of overwhelming force and cathartic destruction.

The same arc can be found in each character’s weaponry, which employ their own unique main weapons, and a powerful sub weapon regulated by a heat gauge. There are some regular standbys like machine guns, shotguns and flamethrowers, but there’s plenty of more esoteric weapons like cannonballs, plasma fields, remote controlled propeller blades and drills. More importantly, they each change the way you interact with the space, making each character feel distinct and useful for certain situations.

No matter which character you pick you’ll need to be actively engaged too--timing of attacks matters as much as direction, especially with weapons like the sniper-like railgun or the propeller, which accelerates in your chosen direction as you pull the trigger and returns when you release it. The switch between weapons isn’t instant either, requiring your character to flip to their holstered weapon. Crucially, there’s a small moment of invincibility when you do, letting you pass through otherwise difficult to navigate bullet hell patterns. There’s a lot of finesse to the controls, and learning the nuances is as important and good planning and crowd control.

Thankfully, failing along the path to learning these nuances isn’t too harsh. Cactus has a unique approach to failure--your character has their own health bar, but losing it only knocks them out for a few seconds while you try to recover. The bigger threat is the battery bar, which constantly ticks down as you play. This needs to be replenished by picking up a powerup via defeated enemies. Essentially, Cactus wants you to keep up a sense of momentum, and death is only a temporary setback that gives you a moment to reset yourself before getting back into the fight.

In that way dying is more like driving off course in a racing game: once or twice will set you back but won’t end the race, but too many and you might as well quit since your time will definitely get you disqualified. Getting a battery at a clutch moment even gives you that same feeling of coasting through a checkpoint at the last second, extending your time and putting on the pressure to play cleaner. The penalty initially feels weird, but it turns out to be a smart solution, encouraging you to pay attention and do better, while letting you brute force through particularly troublesome levels without the intrinsic sense of failure that comes from seeing a continue screen.

Along those same lines, the Switch version provides new accessibility options, including an auto aim option that makes it playable on a single joy-con, as well as making it easier for people who have trouble aiming. This sacrifices some of the fine control that comes with two joysticks, which feels more noticeable with particular characters, but it’s an admirable addition that opens up the game to a wider group of players.

On the flipside, there’s a new campaign of remixed levels that’s much harder than the base game. Even the first level took me several tries to get through. I never felt that I hadn’t been prepared for them, but they demand way cleaner play than the main game. They felt comparable to the way something like Devil May Cry would mix up harder difficulties, putting in new enemy configurations to create new challenges for players revisiting the game.

Crucially, all of this performs great as well. A lot of Switch ports tend to suffer from limited resources, especially when coming from a higher end platform, but developer Witch Beam personally put in the effort to make sure everything ran smoothly in this version. No matter how many enemies or bullets crowded the screen, I never experienced any real slowdown. Menus are snappy, response is fast and the animations and art direction shine through, even if the visuals obviously can’t match the higher end platforms.