Cygni: All Guns Blazing
BULLET HECK
CYGNI: ALL GUNS BLAZING is an accessible shoot-’em-up with some clever twists
By Justin Wagner
The average level in Cygni: All Guns Blazing is about 15 minutes long, give or take, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like a two-and-a-half hour special effects showcase that ought to have ended with a fade to black and ‘Directed by Michael Bay’ in big, bold letters. Cygni’s audio-visual bombast is difficult to overstate, with its Unreal Engine 4-powered hordes of alien jet fighters screaming toward you from above and below.
After just a couple hours of playing, I felt like my senses had been jackhammered to sludge—and it was intoxicating. Don’t get me wrong, I love my pixel art, but dodging incoming trains, taking potshots at a flying space whale and blowing apart sleek alien tanks is riotous when it looks and feels this good. It runs like a dream, too, aside from some frame drops in the especially chaotic final level.