Eh?!

Game is really cool but crashes at stage 3 and all the fixes I've tried don't work or cause more problems, so I can't recommend it

Played this before it would eventually get released on steam. Great SHMUP with a unique graphical style accompanied by its challenging, yet rewarding gameplay. if this game would work on the steam deck (there's little to no information on getting this game to work in SteamOS) then that would be amazing. Anyone wanting to play a new shmup should definitely check this one out!

i played this game more than 15 years ago, much more, times before steam, when it was a demo, very different than today, this game arrived with that jp demo games pack CDs, times when games like Die Slave, X Synergy Gate, Gun Viper and others was our standard games. cloudphobia was one between many, was one of the coolest of that times, but today it is just a small game to spend time and train reflex, yet a good game.

i never expected that cloudphobia would resurrect from nothing after all these years, yes the game was one of coolest, but if i questioned myself from the past "what of these games will be back in future?" i would say x synergy gate or die slave...

anyway, cloudphobia was a surprise to see full, but all this time made the game forgotten, there is only 14 votes? if was 17 years ago, this game probably would be with more than 5000 votes.

yet, even being easier than the demo, we can still call this game as "just another regular game harder than cuphead" hehehhehehe well, is not rare, even because cuphead is the easiest game on this style.

well, i think the developer droped this work and prompted to give life to the project from night to day...

but skip the intro, is ugly, weird... because the mecha design is very nice and the game itself has good visual.

After 13 years, this is still one of the most badass feeling shmups I've ever played. I had an old downloadable version before repurchasing on steam a while back. The graphical effects are well executed and felt ahead of their time when I first played it, especially for a 2D/3D rails shooter. The technical art direction has a unique timelessness that still holds up for me. It nails the intensity of piloting an ultra high-speed but dangerously light-on-armor mech, ripping through squadrons of enemies.

Gameplay-wise, It has the same addictive arcade quality as the Time Crisis series. You have some manual control over the speed of the linear levels through a boost button. You can use it to ramp up the difficulty, but it also directly affects your score and in turn the shields you regenerate at the end of each level. I hadn't played any other shmups quite like this, and I enjoy the manual control even though I'm still on rails The game itself isn't that long if you can complete it (which I still haven't). The cool factor keeps me coming back periodically though. I appreciate that especially as someone that doesn't yet fully appreciate the danmaku genre in which most of what's going on at any given time is noise you have to filter out in order to pay attention to what's going to be near your 4 pixel hitbox in the next second or two. By contrast, many of the actual gameplay sections of levels feel like well-directed mech dogfights from anime.

If you like mechs, shmups, or challenging and unique arcade shooters, this one is definitely worth a try, especially for the $5.99 price tag. I'd probably spend at least an order of magnitude more trying to beat this at an actual arcade over time.

3/10 far better games on steam that are exactly like this but with more depth and content

Ancient classic. Never had I thought, that I'd found this game on Steam.
Well it's a good, lil' SHMUP game and has a place in my heart!

As you can see from my playtime, I've played this game quite a bit. I first played this game many years ago when a demo version with the first stage was included in a computer game magazine. Then I forgot about it for a long time until I stumbled upon a trailer for this game on Youtube . I liked the trailer and bought this game after a while and well, here we are.

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Gameplay:

The main gameplay idea is this: On one hand, you cannot let too many enemies pass or else the mothership gets destroyed. But on the other hand if you take too much time destroying each enemy, you cannot finish the stage within the time limit, so it's necessary to find the right balance and often make sacrifices on one of these sides (for example, by boosting and ignoring some enemies). I think this is a pretty cool idea, but it can be quite stressful if you're striving for perfection, like when you play for a high score.

My favorite thing in this game is the boost. I just like the feeling when everything (enemies, bullets, the background) accelerates when you boost and I think speedruns of this game would be cool to watch if some people were to go for it.

The two weapon types (rifle and blade) each have quite different properties and require you to play in a different style. It's also really cool how some parts were designed such that one weapon has a clear advantage over another. Though in total I prefer the rifle. If you play with the blade weapon it's always necessary to get close to an enemy just to deal damage making it easy to get hit. With the rifle you can keep a safe distance and if you need to go for high DPS, point-blanking with the rifle is almost as good as repeatedly doing the 1-2-slash with the blade. In addition, repeatedly doing the 1-2-slash with the blade (which I think has the highest DPS) requires you to press the attack button with a specific timing which is a bit annoying. If you mess up the timing, you'll start the sword spinning attack which has low DPS and is useless for stronger enemies. It's also hard to set up bosses for the 16x score multiplier if you use the blade and on Hard difficulty enemies sometimes still fire suicide bullets even if they are in melee range. So yeah, in total I found the blade to be much harder to use and maybe it could have been balanced a bit differently on that side.

Each stage is fairly short with a time limit of 180 seconds (3 minutes) and a full playthrough takes no longer than 15 minutes. For some people this might be too short, but I actually liked the brevity a lot. It allows you to play short sessions, and it's not too annoying if you fail an 1CC attempt. I had a lot of fun replaying and practicing the stages because of that.

The one big thing I don't like about this game is the stun animation whenever you get hit. You can't control your character during the animation, you get pushed in a direction and it lasts way too long. Because of that it happens quite often that getting hit messes up your strategy: Smaller enemies on the screen cannot be destroyed in time and leave the screen and more often than not you're left in a bad position where you have to take even more hits unless you fire missiles for invincibility (this happens even more when you play on Hard). I think this really could have been done better.

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Story:

The story is pretty much non-existent in the game. There are some explanatory texts in the manual and on the Japanese website[www.dwahan.net] of Marsbound for Stage 1, but the game itself only contains like 3 simple lines of text and some more or less cryptic images. I still don't really have an idea what happens storywise in the stages and how they are connected. But well, it's a shoot 'em up first and foremost, so this is probably not that important to most people.

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Difficulty:

I've just managed to 1CC this game on the highest difficulty (Hard) with both rifle and blade (after ~25 hours of total playtime, you can find replays of the 1CC runs on Hard if you look at the game's online leaderboards, sorted by score (rifle) or time (blade)). Though I have to say that my shoot 'em up skills aren't very good, so if you frequently play this type of games, you'll probably be able to do the same in less time.

The game is quite easy to pick up on Easy and becomes a bit challenging on Normal requiring a bit of memorization. However, when you play on Hard, there is a large jump in difficulty. Even after getting 1CCs on Normal, I couldn't get past the first stage on hard on my first attempts. Especially on Hard it is necessary to use the scoring system as good as you can (the most important rules being "get the 16x multiplier by destroying red enemies and bosses with missiles", "destroy red enemies after white enemies" and "use the invincibility after firing missiles to avoid damage") since the amount of health replenished after each stage directly depends on your score. So for me during the Hard difficulty 1CC, it was pretty much necessary to memorize all enemy spawns and sometimes even devise routes and strategies for bosses. But it is satisfying to see how you improve and survive longer with each 1CC attempt.

It should be noted that there are no continues in this game. If your mech gets destroyed, it's Game Over and stages are only unlocked for practice mode at a certain difficulty if you beat them during a playthrough on that difficulty. Though I guess this is not uncommon.

So in total the game is easy to pick up but becomes quite memorization-focused on Hard. I would have preferred if there was not such a large gap between Normal and Hard.

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Graphics:

Of course the graphics are behind the times when you compare the game to more recent shoot 'em ups, but I think for its age (even before it released on Steam) the game looks quite good. Some of the extra effects (like the rain drops in Stage 1) are pretty to look at (although Stage 4 might have been better without the screen shaking) and the design of the stages is pretty cool. My favorite stage in that regard is Stage 2 with the purple, sunset-like atmosphere, especially when you're boosting.

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Music:

The music is also pretty nice, you can even download the soundtrack for free when you get the game. My favorites are the music for Stage 1, 2 and 4 (which contains some nice musical references to Stage 1). Not too fond of the Stage 3 music though because it sounds very different from the rest of the soundtrack.

In total, the game has its quirks, but looking back on my time playing it, I had lots of fun and enjoyed playing this game. It's a pretty cool game, so it gets my thumbs-up.

Bought this game about 12 years ago and thought it was a great game then and its still fantastic game now. Has an absolute killer soundtrack to go with the style of game.

Shoot em' up orrizzontale carino niente di troppo epico