Xmas Shooting - Scramble!! Review

When it comes to Christmas, I am not exactly the poster boy for holiday cheer. Christmas never really got to me - even as a child - and while it is nice to give and receive and eat too much and drink even more, I’d be just fine without tinsel and Christmas songs. Which is why I’m the obvious candidate for reviewing a Christmas game in February, because I can be completely and totally unbiased towards it.

So here we are, with Xmas Shooting - Scramble!!, a shmup bullet hell from developers Orange_Juice based on their 2014 release QP Shooting - Dangerous!!. You play as Aru, or Santa - with no previous knowledge of the games I suspect a lot of references are lost on me. Someone has stolen all the Christmas presents, and it’s up to Aru and the strange rotund reindeer to find them by killing as many festive icons as they can.

That story is told through visual novel style cutscenes, with character drawings appearing next to a textbox with their dialogue. The writing is simplistic but well translated, and features a probably appropriate level of animu-speak. The characters are rendered in the manga style, with large eyes and overly expressive features though as is typical with visual novels feature no animation.

These images are also used in the gameplay, although significantly smaller and less detailed. All of the enemies sport this style and the main objects you’ll be focusing on the screen all look like they belong in the same world. The backdrops are all rendered in 3D, however, and while you can usually not see them through the gameplay there are some sections where it’s a little bit jarring to see these 2D character sprites in the 3D world.

There are only three stages in Xmas Shooting, and they’re each a reasonable length. There are also four difficulty levels and leaderboards for each difficulty meaning there is some replayability. Time for a slight confession however: I am not the greatest at bullet hell games, and I couldn’t even beat this one on the easiest difficulty. I get pretty close, getting right to the end of the final boss a couple of times before succumbing to my inability to watch the whole screen at once.

That isn’t made easy by the sheer number of bullets that this game throws at you, and I was relieved to find that the bullets disappear when the enemy that fired them is dead. I think it would be impossible otherwise, since the screen is flooded with patternless attacks. Fortunately, unlike most bullet hells I’ve played you begin with spread attacks, allowing you to clear the screen quite quickly. There are three variations that you can switch between in each level, and these can be changed when starting a level from a small selection.

These bullet spreads allow the game to spawn enemies behind you, which it does with reckless abandon. I found the mechanic for switching these to be quite cumbersome, since the only way I could get it to work was through toggling using the V key. Since movement is done with the arrow keys, and shooting done with Z, reaching over to V was a bit of a stretch. I tried to rebind them but the toggle wasn’t in the menu, instead having dedicated buttons for each firing mode, except they didn’t work.

On the subject of things not working, I found the bullet collision to be somewhat inconsistent. I think this was just the hitbox on the character model being much smaller than it looks, but everything was so hectic that I can’t tell. That said, some of the things that definitely look like bullets didn’t kill me when they passed through the character model.

None of that matters really, however, because the soundtrack is good. Like, really good. I don’t like Christmas songs, but Xmas Shooting has a soft rock soundtrack with just a tinge of Christmas bells. I found myself nodding my head in time with the beat, and the tune on the third stage has been stuck in my head for several hours now.

So, despite being a month late and having a total Scrooge play it, Xmas Shooting - Scramble!! has come off rather well: it is a very competent and enjoyable shmup with bullet hell elements that has casual visual novel elements and a fantastic soundtrack. I’m terrible at this genre, but I had a load of fun playing this and someone a bit more dedicated will get a lot out of this game.