Fast Striker Review

The humble traditional shoot ‘em up or shmup has seen a pretty big resurgence in recent years, with the likes of M2 porting classics like Battle Garegga and Dangun Feveron to modern consoles and a whole slew of indie developers keeping the genre alive. Fast Striker from NGDEV is the latest title to put your bullet dodging skills to the test.

NGDEV is a small developer from Germany that has made unlicensed, independent titles for the Neo Geo and Dreamcast including the R-Type inspired Last Hope and the Turrican-esque GunLord. Fast Striker is a port of their 2010 Neo Geo release, this time with the assistance of eastasiasoft to officially bring it to the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation Vita.

Fast Striker is a fast-paced vertical shmup that on the surface doesn’t seem too different to a myriad of other titles in the genre, but it actually offers a variety of ways to play which make it a good entry point if you are new to the genre. At the same time there is enough here to be equally interesting if you are a hardcore veteran.

The game opens up with a mode select screen offering Novice, Original, Maniac and Omake (which basically means Extra or Bonus in Japanese); each one offers unique scoring mechanics and ship types which is an interesting if unconventional twist. Typically for the genre you’d get to select a mode, then a ship type but in Fast Striker they are intrinsically linked.

Novice mode provides you with a ship that has a spread shot when tapping fire and an even wider spread when holding the button down. Original replaces this wider spread with rockets that do more damage to larger enemies. Maniac and Omake both provide ships that would feel right at home in a bullet-hell shmup like DoDonPachi or Mushihimesama as they replace the hold functionality with what is affectionately called the Grind beam. In all modes you can shoot both forwards and backwards down the screen, which becomes essential for some sections.

As well as changing the ship visuals and weapons, each mode plays differently when it comes to scoring mechanics. Novice and Original have a focus on medal collection, with the latter mode gaining a bit more finesse by also having gold nuggets as bonus point pickups from utilising rockets to destroy large enemies quickly. This encourages riskier positioning as you try and down bad guys for those lovely bonus points.

Maniac and Omake however dispense completely with the medal collection system and move to a combo system more inline with something you’d see in a game by CAVE like DoDonPachi. Destroying enemies in quick succession raises a combo multiplier, their distance from you when destroyed determining how much it goes up by. This in turn can be kept active by killing more enemies before it times out or using the grind beam on larger enemies.

All in all these modes all play differently enough that once you’ve mastered the lower modes, moving up to the next is more than just a difficulty boost as you’ve got to relearn the best ways to earn points. The game itself has six stages, with each typically having a mid-boss and a huge screen sized end of level boss.

Each stage has its own environmental gimmick, such as phasing laser grids or moving pathways but visually don’t really stand out from each other. The game kind of looks the same from start to finish which is a shame, although the visuals are really quite nice overall.

The port, whilst not offering anything new in terms of gameplay over the original releases, does offer a selection of visual options like being able to toggle scanlines and adjust their intensity as well as scale the image to your preference. It also has rebindable controls and although the default pad configuration was fine for me, it’s a nice option for those using an arcade stick.

Fast Striker might not break any new ground or do anything particularly special but it’s a solid, fun and challenging shoot ‘em up that is definitely worth sinking some time into. Oh, the soundtrack is excellent too!