CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is a sci-fi-inspired, arcade-style bullet hell where you fight against an endless wave of mechanical monsters on an alien planet. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Review Overview

What is CYGNI: All Guns Blazing?

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing plunges you into an electrifying arcade-style, top-down twin-stick shooter that melds vibrant sci-fi aesthetics with pulse-pounding bullet-hell action. Navigate the war-ravaged skies of CYGNI, a distant alien world where Earth's forces are locked in a fierce battle against ancient, mysterious mechanical titans. As an unnamed pilot, your mission is to protect the skies, facing a relentless swarm of enemy aircraft, artillery, and ground troops. Obliterate your foes with a barrage of firepower, cutting a contrail-lined swathe through the chaos. Can humanity endure the relentless assault of CYGNI's ancient machines, or will they share this grave with these Titans?

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing features:
　⚫︎　Upgradable aircraft weapon systems
　⚫︎　Fast-paced, arcade-style shoot-em-up combat
　⚫︎　7 lengthy combat stages with 3 difficult levels each
　⚫︎　AAA cinematics and 3D graphics
　⚫︎　Tactical shield and weapon system balancing system
　⚫︎　22 achievement badges to collect

Steam		PSN		Xbox
$29.99

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
A Challenge From A Different Era True Essence of A Shoot-em-up	A Challenge From A Different Era True Essence of A Shoot-em-up

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Overall Score - 80/100

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing is an instant arcade classic in every sense of the term. It captures the charm and challenge of traditional arcade games, while also exhibiting the unintuitiveness and minimal storytelling typical of coin-op classics. Despite this, it shines as a AAA wonder, featuring the high-quality graphics and audio you’d expect from a major studio. Balancing these strengths and weaknesses, CYGNI sets a blazing trail for other classic arcade shoot-em-ups to follow and soar into the skyline of modern gaming.

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Story - 6/10

CYGNI's story isn't particularly engaging or well-written. The world-building is decent, and the overall design reflects this quality. However, despite its impressive AAA graphics and the potential for rich storytelling such visuals could support, the game takes a page from other arcade shooters’ books and prioritizes gameplay over narrative.

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Gameplay - 8/10

CYGNI’s gameplay wouldn’t be out of place in a retro arcade, and I mean that as a compliment. Even at the lowest settings, its inherent difficulty evokes a bygone era of game design, offering a challenge that compensates for its smaller level count. However, like other arcade games, it does little to inform the player of its systems, making replays necessary and progression somewhat unfulfilling. Sometimes, overselling nostalgia can be a drawback, and an arcade game’s non-existent tutorial is a feature best left in the past.

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Visuals - 10/10

CYGNI’s visuals are absolutely stellar, blending a modern 3D sci-fi finish with a top-down view reminiscent of decades past. The cinematics are incredibly well-made and well-directed, standing proudly alongside those of modern AAA games. While it certainly could’ve benefitted from more cinematics to shape the game's art direction, this minor shortcoming doesn't detract from its overall graphical excellence.

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Audio - 9/10

Half of CYGNI’s cinematic experience lies in its amazing audio, from the sci-fi, inspirational strings of its combat music to the upbeat funk of its cinematic soundtracks. The sound design for the UI and combat elements is just as superb. The only drawback is the soundtrack's lack of variety, but despite this, CYGNI offers a nearly perfect auditory experience to accompany its blazing gunfire.

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Value for Money - 7/10

$30 is a considerable price for any game, especially for an arcade-style top-down shooter. While CYGNI is certainly worth the price—you likely won’t regret buying it—the disparity between its AAA graphics and minimal campaign content might deter those expecting a more substantial experience.

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Review: Blazing A Contrail For Arcade Shoot 'Em Ups

I've been a gamer for most of my life, and it all started in the early 2000s when I got my hands on a PlayStation. Yes, the first one. While I don't remember many of the games I played on it, one arcade-style scrolling shooter called Strikers 1945 stands out. It was a pixel-art aircraft shoot-em-up that let you pilot various WWII aircraft in a perpetual dogfight on a scrolling screen. I mention this now because CYGNI: All Guns Blazing gave me the same vibe. It has that arcade-style difficulty where you get killed in one hit while dodging a million bullets. It's not exactly nostalgia, since I played more memorable PS1 games like Pac-Man World, but this memory highlights some of CYGNI's distinctions as a modern arcade classic.

Let’s begin by expounding on what I’ve already mentioned. CYGNI: All Guns Blazing—henceforth referred to as CYGNI—is a twin-stick, arcade-style, top-down shooter with sci-fi elements and a minor upgrade progression system. We’ll move past the game’s upgrade progression system for the time being and focus on the game’s core gameplay loop. CYGNI involves standard shoot-em-up mechanics like bullet hells, a constantly scrolling screen, elaborate boss fights, and on-screen power-ups. Think Touhou Project but with futuristic aircraft instead of anime girls. While CYGNI doesn't innovate in these areas, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Where CYGNI starts to distinguish itself is with its power rerouting mechanic (not its official name), which forces you to manage a strategic resource-management layer while dodging bullets in real time. It’s a simple idea, but with so many projectiles filling the screen, it feels like rocket science. Essentially, you’re rerouting power between your shields and weapons. Allocating more power to each system increases its effectiveness: shields let you tank more hits, and weapons let you hit harder. The challenge comes from the scarcity of power, as taking a hit depletes a pip of power from your shields—if you have any routed there. If you don’t, you just die.

The more hits you take, the more balancing you’ll have to do, constantly choosing between survivability and firepower with dwindling resources as the level progresses. Fortunately, killing enemies drops pick-ups that restore a pip of power each, although you still have to maneuver around bullets to collect them. If you gain these pick-ups while at full power, they turn into upgrade materials, but we’ll cover that later.

As one can imagine, managing power levels while flying at Mach 10 isn’t the easiest task, so you'll inevitably take a lot of hits and scramble to pick up power to replenish your stores. This limits your upgrade materials at the end of the stage, but it adds a more nuanced strategy than just "getting gud" and never being hit. You can tank hits on purpose if you have the power to spare or reroute all your weapon power to shields for that final push if you need to.

Another aspect of CYGNI is the necessity to switch between ground and air targets, as you have different weapon sets for each enemy type. Ignoring ground forces is a bad idea, as their attacks fill the screen just as much as the enemy aircraft do. However, focusing only on ground forces would quickly end your run as enemy aircraft swarm you. You can't shoot both simultaneously unless you use your limited missiles, so a good strategy involves knowing which enemy type to prioritize. This sets CYGNI apart from other aircraft shoot-em-ups, which usually don't differentiate between ground and air targets. Conflate that with the constant power rerouting, and you’ve got a shoot-em-up loop that’s always engaging.

Moving swiftly onward to CYGNI’s upgrade progression, we reach our first bump in the road, so to speak. CYGNI lets you turn the pick-ups you gather from every stage into upgrades for your ship. Such upgrades include new bullet patterns, drones, lock-on modules, or even powerful, screen-clearing abilities. Kitting out your aircraft is half the fun in this game, but you’ll never get acquainted with it, at least with what CYGNI gives you by way of instruction. This reflects a bigger issue regarding the game’s lack of proper tutorials, but to touch on it briefly, most of the upgrades don’t have tooltips to inform the player on what exactly they’re upgrading, just a price and icon. Those that do have them aren’t very descriptive, making upgrading an absolute crapshoot.

You’re also encouraged to create various bullet arrays in the upgrade screen, letting you shoot straighter or wider depending on what you assign to each of your many guns. Again, this isn’t communicated properly, and I imagine most players would ignore this mechanic completely if a proper tutorial for it isn’t provided in future updates. That said, there is a tutorial and it’s awful.

CYGNI’s tutorial is stylized to look like a retro shooter, really wearing its influences on its sleeve. In the tutorial, you learn how to shoot, avoid damage, reroute power, switch between ground and air targets, and find pickups. What bothers me about this tutorial is its "one and done" approach to instruction, forcing the player to apply what they've learned immediately and never revisit it. If you miss something, you have to restart. Additionally, the tutorial is not representative of actual gameplay, as the enemies are significantly dumbed down. This gave me some whiplash when transitioning to actual gameplay, where I wasn't expecting so many enemies all at once.

The worst part about the tutorial, however, is its optional nature. I didn't even realize there was one until I saw it in the level select. For a game like this, where old mechanics meet new ones, a tutorial is essential and should not be optional. It wasn't even long enough to justify making it optional, and the alternative is throwing the player into the deep end and hoping they figure things out. This approach does not make for good and engaging game design and is a relic of arcade-style gameplay best left in the past.

Now, on to the game’s aesthetics and sound. CYGNI’s AAA presentation should clash with the retro stylings of its enemy waves and bullet-hell attacks, but its expertly directed aesthetics and sounds marry the past, present, and future beautifully. Simply put, this game isn’t just a AAA filter on a retro game; it’s an integration of modern graphics into decade-old game design elements, creating something new and exciting in the process. Take the game’s intro cinematic, for example. It begins with an upbeat, funk-driven morning routine you might expect to see in an Overwatch hero announcement trailer, but soon transitions into a war-torn sky, complete with photographic parallax and an inspiring soundtrack.

It’s easy to see what makes this game retro, but you can never separate it from the modernity of its presentation. Case in point is the dissonance between its arcade-style difficulty and its AAA graphics. You’d expect a game that looks like this to throw you a bone now and then, but CYGNI will not. Every level is a lengthy, pitched battle in the skies that requires every ounce of your concentration from beginning to end to survive. There aren’t many levels, but each one is a tailor-made challenge that will demand even the most experienced arcade player to lock in. Even Strikers 1945 wasn’t this hard.

Lastly, let's delve into the game's weakest point: its story. CYGNI offers a standard "humans vs. aliens" sci-fi plot with a mechanical twist. While the world-building and narrative are well-crafted and occasionally quite engaging, the pacing leaves much to be desired. With only seven levels, the game delivers large chunks of exposition followed by 15-minute segments of gameplay without checkpoints. This rapid-fire storytelling leaves players struggling to keep up, resulting in tonal whiplash and a sense of playing narrative catch-up by the end.

And that’s the end of the runway for CYGNI: All Guns Blazing. It’s a great arcade-style, top-down shooter with many innovations to the basic formula that make it so much more than a standard bullet-hell. Maybe it could’ve presented its innovations better and given more effort to its story, but at the end of the day, it’s blazing a contrail for other arcade shooters to follow suit and give players of today a challenge from the arcades of yesteryear.

Pros of CYGNI: All Guns Blazing

Things CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Got Right
A Challenge From A Different Era True Essence of A Shoot-em-up

A Challenge From A Different Era

One of CYGNI’s biggest draws is its challenging difficulty and unique progression style. The game features no checkpoints, so if you die—no matter how close you were to victory—you’ll be sent back to the start of the stage, losing all your upgrade materials and a bit of your pride. This game will put you in your place if you don’t respect its challenge and take it seriously. While you can switch between difficulty levels, this only adjusts enemy bullet speed—you can still die from a single hit if your shields are down.

This challenge harkens back to a different gaming era, which many newer gamers, myself included, might initially find frustrating. However, the grind and the gradual mastery required to conquer each stage bring a unique joy. It's reminiscent of the satisfaction found in Soulslike games but with a more nuanced suite of strategic options that don't force players into a "git gud" mindset. Very few games aiming to evoke the arcade style manage to strike this balance to the same degree that CYGNI does.

True Essence of A Shoot-em-up

CYGNI captures the true essence of a shoot-em-up, going beyond its challenging difficulty and retro aesthetics. One standout feature is its screen-wide, often eclectic boss battles, reminiscent of the classic Japanese shoot-em-ups. While the absurdity has been toned down to appeal to a broader audience, the boss designs and variety still reflect a strong commitment to the pinnacle of retro shoot-em-up design.

Additionally, CYGNI retains a wealth of traditional shoot-em-up gameplay features. Enemy patterns remain geometrically complex despite the game's more grounded narrative; players never run out of bullets, fitting the semi-futuristic setting; and the main character remains nameless, echoing the faceless protagonists of classic shoot-em-ups. Any doubt about CYGNI's identity as a true shoot-em-up is completely unfounded and, frankly, absurd.

Cons of CYGNI: All Guns Blazing

Things That CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Can Improve
Somewhat Wasted AAA Potential Library Barely Exists

Somewhat Wasted AAA Potential

CYGNI's AAA presentation was somewhat wasted, despite my praise for its graphical quality. While the game undeniably looks great, its 3D sci-fi aesthetics seem to serve mainly as a fresh coat of paint for the traditional shoot-em-up genre. The story, unfortunately, didn't benefit as much as it could have. The poor pacing, driven by the game's arcade-style storytelling, undermined any narrative improvements that the enhanced graphics might have brought.

The gameplay, at least, looks much more appropriate for a modern audience, and the overall art direction looks on par with contemporary design standards.

Library Barely Exists

The only element of CYGNI that feels tacked on is its Library, a collection of the enemies and locales encountered in each stage. Although presented creatively as a sort of planetarium, it doesn't offer much content. With only seven stages and seven planets, plus around thirty enemies, the Library hardly qualifies as a menagerie. It contributes to the game’s lore and world-building by providing more information about each planet encountered, but I don’t think that’s enough value added to justify an entirely subpar library.

Is CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Worth It?

Worth More Than A Few Quarters…If You Can Spare Them

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing isn’t just another arcade game; it’s a nostalgic return to form, boasting impressive AAA-quality designs and intelligent gameplay elements. However, how much you enjoy this game depends on your love for the arcade shoot-em-up genre. At $30, it might feel steep for anyone but the most hardcore players.

The game doesn’t offer much in terms of story or extras, which might affect its value for the typical modern gamer. Nonetheless, its gameplay and graphical quality are top-notch. If that’s enough for you, then grab a roll of quarters (or several) and be prepared to lose yourself in this modern arcade shoot-em-up.

Platforms
Steam		PSN		Xbox
$29.99

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing FAQ

Who Composed The Music of CYGNI: All Guns Blazing?

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing’s soundtrack was made in-house by award-winning composer and orchestrator Vatche Kalenderian.

How Many Stages Does CYGNI: All Guns Blazing Have?

CYGNI: All Guns Blazing has 7 story levels covering different stages of the war on Planet CYGNI. It also has an endless Arcade Mode that’s unlocked after completing the game’s Store Mode.

Why Is The Game Called CYGNI: All Guns Blazing?

According to the game’s official website, "CYGNI is a genitive form of Cygnus used when naming stars. Cygnus is a northern constellation lying on the plane of the Milky Way. In the game, CYGNI is a planet colonized by humans who are benefiting from an ancient technology left over in ruins by an unknown alien civilization, scavenging it for tech and power."

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CYGNI Product Information

Title	CYGNI: ALL GUNS BLAZING
Release Date	August 6, 2024
Developer	KeelWork
Publisher	KONAMI
Supported Platforms	PC(Steam, Epic Games Store), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
Genre	Action, Shoot ‘Em Up, Arcade
Number of Players	Offline (1-2 Splitscreen)
Rating	ESRB E 10+
Official Website	CYGNI Official Website

Aaron Bruce Albert..

A massive fan of roguelikes, turn-based RPGs, and open world adventure games. His gold standard games include The Binding of Isaac, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Dragon Quest Monsters Joker.