Lucky me gets to write the first review for Tiger Fighter 1931 Tora!. This is a free to play 2D top down vertical scrolling arcade shoot 'em up where you control what I think is some kind of airplane against a bunch of other planes. It's hard to tell, as the screenshots show, there's some really bad graphics here.

Although this is a copy of the GameMaker Studio shoot 'em up template, original assets have been used. Despite this, the gameplay is fluid and you have a big area to move around in, so the bullet hell dynamics get interesting. You have room to dodge and control the flow of the game that most shoot 'em ups fail to grasp. There's also a reasonable array of pickups that give you different firing modes and upgrade your firepower.

While this was a paid product, the developer made the noble move of making the game free to play. However, there's still a bizarre $20 USD worth of very empty DLC that makes this seem like some kind of suspicious cash grab. That, combined with the very poor graphics, lack of polish, and locked resolution and controls (and the bad control scheme) make this too far below acceptable quality for PC.

It's also noteworthy that this game has been copied and pasted roughly 5 times from the GameMaker Studio template. Copying a game template does not make someone a developer any more than copying a document template in Microsoft Word would make me an author. It's unclear what the developer thought they would accomplish by trying to sell the exact same game 5 times, with a slightly different name.

I can't recommend this.