Thank you Stellar Circle for sending us this game to review!

Blue Revolver is the first game produced by Stellar Circle and it’s built from the ground up to be fast and furious for beginners and shoot 'em up veterans alike. One of its features is to alter the difficulty by your skill level. I’m not sure how exactly this works, but when I played the game on my unplugged laptop the game was slower paced than normal and I played exceptionally well that time around. I chalked it up to my laptop being on battery, but it could have been the difficulty adjustment at work. There are three difficulty levels you can choose from: normal, hyper, and parallel. There’s a nice surprise for those that can complete the game in parallel mode. I have no idea what that entails.

I’m not particularly good at shoot 'em ups, but I do enjoy playing them. Blue Revolver is well polished and quite fun to play. Although there are two pilots to choose from, I can only find the backstory on one of them, Mae. An environmental group called “Blue Revolver” is after the rabbit-eared genius pilot after she provoked them with her hacking and destruction abilities. Val doesn’t seem to have much information about her other than being labeled as an errand girl on the Steam store page. Each pilot has a unique ship and abilities for it.

Both ships have three firing modes: power, wide, and follow. I preferred the wide firing mode to have a broad scattering of my ship’s bullets. Mae’s ship also has offensive abilities like plasma lancer, hyper laser, cluster missile and the defensive ability, vortex barrier. Val’s offensive abilities include arc caster, hyper laser, and cluster missile. For defense, she has a stasis field. Each ability is rated for its power, coverage, and efficiency. Choose wisely!

Like most shoot 'em ups your ship has a tiny vulnerable spot that you need to protect from bullets, lasers, and missiles. In theory, this sounds pretty easy, but when your screen is filled with bullets it takes some skill to dodge everything. Bombs can be used to clear the screen but they’re in limited supply so you’ll have to use them cautiously.

Most enemies can be taken down with a small spray of bullets but the mini-bosses and end level bosses will require more firepower to go down. Your ship’s special offensive ability will come in handy to do significant damage to them. All enemies big or small will drop loot that you should collect if you want to raise your game score. When your game ends, you can submit your score to the online leaderboard if you’re playing this game in Windows. I’ve noticed that you’ll get a strange error if you try to do this while offline or if your internet drops on you.

The anime-style character artwork is great looking and the backdrop of the two pilots is nice, though I would have preferred a bigger game window. There will be an HD version of the game and I look forward to checking that out when it releases! The story mode has five missions and they all take place in different terrains. The levels and enemies have a good amount of variety and complexity to them. There are also twenty-four individual missions you can complete in any order.

As you play, you can unlock various background music remixes and artwork from the game. There are also forty Steam achievements and trading cards offered. The upbeat techno soundtrack is available to purchase for $7.99. The Japanese voice acting is upbeat and fitting.
Overall, Blue Revolver is a solid shoot 'em up that’s worth grabbing if you’re a fan of them. Not surprisingly, it has spaceship violence and explosions so it’s pretty tame morally. Between the leaderboards, Steam achievements, multiple difficulties and number of missions, there’s plenty of replayability here.