This week we take a look at the vertical shoot 'em up Blue Wish Resurrection Plus for the PC, developed by x.x.

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Blue Wish Resurrection Plus

For this week’s discussion of indie games, I thought I’d drift toward the wonderful world of doujin games, Japanese homebrews. Blue Wish Resurrection Plus (BWR), developed by x.x, is a nice little old-school schmup with five levels that have tons of action squeezed into every inch of them.

Players start the game by either going into arcade mode where one progresses from one level to the next in the traditional fashion, or one can even select a specific level, or even boss fight, that they want to experience and get right down to it. Like so many other shoot ‘em ups to come out of Japan in recent years, BWR assaults players with unrelenting streams of enemy fire. It is quite common for the screen to be utterly crammed with enemy bullets firing off in every which way, with barely a few millimeters to sneak one’s ship in between. This can be adjusted somewhat depending on which of the three difficulty levels you choose, but I say crank it right up and have at it. The game is at it's best in this way.

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To meet this challenge, players can select from four different ships to fly: the Blue Wish, Blue Peace, Blue Hope, and Eden’s Edge. Each has their own style of weapons fire where Wish has concentrated bullet fire compared to Eden’s Edge which has a spread shot. Meanwhile Hope has a combination of bullets and two concentrated beams that fire straight ahead, and Peace has a form of homing

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bullets. On top of all this, each ship also has a special attack that can be used a limited amount of times for massive damage, and can also get rid of enemy fire for a brief moment. On top of this, the ships also have some defensive measures for dealing with all of the enemy fire coming their way through a sort of shielding simply called “guard”. This will protect the player’s ship from a few attacks before being depleted after which the ship is defenseless.

Production values for the game are pretty decent. Visually, it’s typical sci-fi fair with spaceships, tanks, ground turrets, and so forth all looking to destroy your ship. The main area where it suffers is that because so much is going on at one time, BWR can suffer from slowdown on occasion. It can be a bit distracting, but some might welcome this as it helps them dodge all of the incoming fire a little bit more easily. Personally, I rather liked the music for the game. It’s mostly high-tempo dance music that feels quite appropriate for what’s going on in-game, but if you don’t like the genre it may be best to play with your speakers off.

BWR is definitely worth taking a look at. The game isn’t terribly long, but it’s a fun little distraction well worth spending some time with.

Mr. Nash

November 22, 2009