Great schmup for all!

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Gunvein is a bullet hell game, developed by NGDEV. They reportedly make highly acclaimed games, yet apparently have an allergy when it comes to PC, almost never releasing their games for this platform. And I say "almost" because Gunvein is the only exception.
This is a damn shame, because if their other games are as half as good as Gunvein, we're really missing out on them.

This is not a weak point of the game, just something that feels pretty weird on first launch and I have to address first.
Usually, shmup/bullet hell games offer you a story to put the events into context. They either start with a brief cutscene (Devil Engine, Infinos Gaiden), have the characters talk mid-game (Touhou) or talk about what's happening in the manual (The Tale of ALLTYNEX Trilogy) or on the store page. Often times, the games also feature ending cutscenes explaining the events that happen after the game. That is not to say pure, gameplay-focused shmups don't exist. There are numerous games like this out there (Raiden IV, Crimzon Clover) but the thing is, they never do something that gives you the impression of a story being present.
Gunvein is a game that falls between these titles, and that makes its presentation very weird. It presents brilliantly drawn characters as playable pilots and even features them on the store page, on the soundtrack's album art and in the tutorials, giving you the impression of a story-based game. However, it doesn't offer you any story context in the game and doesn't even give you an ending either. Quite confusing at first if you ask me.

The first and the most important thing that Gunvein does right, is allowing the player to tailor their visual experience. You can decrease the background brightness, turn off the optional HUD on your ship or even decrease the amount of debris in the levels. This is such a great decision that often gets ignored by shmup/bullet hell devs, as it allows you to combat possible visual clarity problems. Not that the game has such problems. The game is also pretty mindful of the newcomers to the genre, providing an excellent tutorial to efficiently explain the bullet hell genre and even shows an optional shop upon choosing to continue, allowing the players to trade their accumulated score for more fighting chances after restarting from a checkpoint. It also allows the players to use a bomb even after after getting hit to prevent losing a life, allowing them to stay in the battle further.
When it comes to the gameplay, Gunvein mostly feels very similar to another game in the same genre that I really love playing: Crimzon Clover. Although it's not as offensive and score-focused as that game and leans more towards bullet hell. From the three playable ships, two of them use the same controls as the default ships in Crimzon Clover, allowing the player to lock on the enemies and shoot homing projectiles while firing your main weapon. The third playable ship trades the lock on ability with another highly damaging attack, making it the most challenging of the bunch to use. Coupled with the responsive controls, great/non-cheap enemy pattern design, very well-made visuals and a really good soundtrack, Gunvein ends up being a really fun game to play. Although this doesn't mean it's not challenging, as any difficulty other than "Mild" will badly kick your ass if you are still not accustomed to dodging bullets.
Beating the main game unlocks the Roguelike Arrange mode, where you can choose the difficulty and then set your desired amount of enemy spawn rate to play through the main game in a randomized level order. You also have the option of playing this mode with the default ships, or use a custom one that can be leveled up and upgraded by killing enemies. Playing through this mode with the normal ships is really fun, as you can make the game as chaotic as you want and on whatever difficulty you want to. But it has some flaws that we'll get into in the next section of this review.
If there's one thing I don't really like about the gameplay, it's how the game refuses to give you more opportunities to restock your bombs upon restarting from the pre-boss checkpoint. If you run out of lives while fighting a boss and want to restart from a checkpoint, the game respawns you with only one bomb, with your only chance of getting more bombs being the shop's RNG. This is a design choice that ultimately punishes the lesser experienced crowd and casuals, especially when it comes to the final boss on anything other than the "Mild" difficulty, by forcing them to redo the entire stage for a better fighting chance.
Now let's get to the actual stuff I consider to be actual problems.

Unfortunately, Gunvein also has a bunch of flaws that prevent it from being truly great.
For starters, I think the way Gunvein gives you additional permanent continues is very poorly designed. The game's mission mode gives you certain tasks to do and upon being successful at finishing them, it rewards you with an additional permanent continue for the normal mode. The first two missions are the easiest, being the tutorials on how to play the game. But the rest of the missions are brutally hard, each also having multiple objectives of their own that need to be fulfilled in order to give you an extra continue. You need to be extremely good at the game to earn them, which then makes them useless as by that point, you are so skilled that you don't even need them anymore.
Next, we have the game taking away your hard-earned extra lives for the sake of enforcing its rules on you. The maximum amount of lives you can get in this game is 3, and should you earn any more extra lives through your gameplay, the game simply discards them instead of adding them to the lives count. Yes, the game tips might say there's no cap on lives, but that means the spawnable amount and not the amount you can hold.
The rouge-like mode is also underwhelming to a degree. While this mode is extremely fun to play after you crank the spawn rate to the max, it ultimately feels pointless. The game only cares about you finishing this mode in one run, so it never records the details of your attempts. This makes each failed attempt feel like a total waste of time, as you never know how well you did or what was your most successful run. And no, the progress bar is not a worthy one. If the devs had at the very least implemented a way so the game would show you the results of your current failed run, it would have been nice. The same can be said about the actual rogue-lite aspect of that mode. The option to play as a custom ship and level up through the levels ends up being not as appealing as one might think, as the ship you start with is severly underpowered compared to the normal ships, and the time it takes for you to level up is rather long. Not to mention how the upgrades you get to choose feel unsubstantial and repetitive.
The final thing I want to mention here, is how the game performs on PC. Despite its looks and running at a solid 60 fps, Gunvein is actually a demanding game featuring loads of visual effects, with probably the longest initial loading time among its peers (10 seconds on an SSD on average). So please be mindful of this if you have a mid to low range PC or a HDD. The game also has a problem with Steam Overlay, prohibiting the players from taking screenshots completely. So one might want to resort to other means in order to record their best results.


A brilliant, high quality bullet hell that feels almost perfect, only having some small flaws. It provides some much appreciated quality-of-life options, and while it's brutal at times, it's fun to play.