Once again we place our twenty pence, or two credits in the virtual arcade cab, and see how far our pocket money goes when playing this bullet hell shooter called Tengai. Subtitled Sengoku Blade Sengoku Ace Episode 2, which is a bit of a mouthful really, and has probably almost doubled the length of this post already and saves me thinking a bit.
So once your credits go in the game presents you with the choice of characters to play as, each with their own brand of death dealing weaponry. For the sake of this I took a random punt, and played as the young lady who fires some balls alongside the normal shots, and just looks pretty. The game isn’t an instant bullet hell, and leads you into a sense of false security as you pick off the first few enemies fairly easily and dodge bullets until you feel like Neo in the Matrix films. The enemies are varied and colourful, although they are very hard to kill even with your power ups which are plentiful along the way.
Then things start to ramp up after the first boss fight, and you need the secondary fire shot of button B to deal extra death, but that quickly runs out and the bullets keep flying at you thick and fast. This suddenly becomes a very tense and very bullet hellish game. I found that 2 credits didn’t take me very far after the initial couple of stages, and this challenge video isn’t very long. I did however practise with lots of credits before hand and saw that this just keeps ramping up, the bosses are harder, the levels keep coming and this would have sucked in an awful lot of credits if someone wanted to complete the game, if you even can, I didn’t even bother continuing after a few levels as it was die, continue, die continue every 20 seconds or so.
If bullet hell shooters of the Japanese variety are your thing then this may be a good one for you. For me it kept ending too quickly and seemed to be impossible to dodge all the bullets at times so death came quickly.