Description

Being a direct sequel to ‘Battle Garegga’, Battle Bakraid is a crazy vertical shoot-’em-up, that belongs to the exotic subgenre of ‘bullet hell’ or ‘manic shooter’ games. These are typically aircraft shooters, where you have to evade barrages of enemy fire by quick maneuvering and memorizing its patterns. Now, let me be completely frank about this. I do like Bakraid’s and Garegga’s settings, I really do. I mean, who doesn’t like queer dieselpunk fighter planes with all their booms and ka-booms? Who? And I certainly love vertical shooters too, heck I was growing up with Raptor, Galaga and Star Soldier, these were my games! But for the love of God, I just can’t get into this piece. The ‘Nintendo hard’ difficulty itself wouldn’t be much of a problem at all. It is the ‘coin-bait’ character of this game that just sets me off. I mean, it is hardly an issue when you play in an emulator, yet one has to realize that at some point in history, people were playing this for actual dough. And boy, is this game a dough-hungry monster! Let’s put all the differences aside though, for all and all, Battle Bakraid as such isn’t that bad at all. There are four playable aircraft you can choose from, and five more that can be unlocked via key-combinations in the select screen. The planes are controlled by an 8-way joystick and two buttons, one for firing the main guns and the other for firing the secondary armament. These—unlike in Garegga—aren’t bound to a specific aircraft in Bakraid, but can be switched by collecting different power-ups in-game instead. The gameplay is somewhat similar to Taito’s ‘Gun Front’ 1990. Destroyed enemies drop power-ups and bomb token as in Gun Front. The setting and graphics is pretty much the same too. One thing is different though: Garegga and Bakraid are way much crazier than Gun Front ever was. Still one could pretty confidently label the franchise as its spiritual successor. A crazy successor, that is. To put it most simplistically: Battle Bakraid is chaos. Pure chaos and epilepsy. If the hardcore difficulty isn’t maddening to you enough, the constant blinking and myriads of colorful lights surely will. Be it the jungle, desert or city suburbs, enemies and the projectiles they are throwing at you are literally everywhere. Of course, dropping a bomb (left alt in default) will eliminate all the bullets from the screen for a while, but then again, you have only a limited supply of these, and you have to collect bomb tokens from destroyed tanks and gun batteries—which isn’t always quite easy. Yet it would be a shame to leave this game out, cause in the end, you don’t have to stuff it with real dough anymore, do you? All it takes is hitting that coin button on your keyboard and you’re all set again…