Bullet Hell Madness: Ghost Blade HD

Ghost Blade is another one of those “recent” Dreamcast games that go into history as “one of the last games on the system”, it took quite a while for Ghost Blade to reach current gen but you can get it on WiiU, PS4, PC and Xbone now and while a Switch version ain’t here yet that might change over time.

The current gen version is more than the added “HD” to the name, new graphics and more enemies, as well as various modes, have been added for both skilled and not so skilled players out there.

The Dreamcast version was way too hardcore for most people, easy mode and the likes have been added in the HD version so that normal gamers “might” stand a chance…

This is a screen you will see quite a lot no matter which difficulty you chose.

The first impression i got was that “hey, this is not that hard”…   20 minutes later it was more like.. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH, THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE!.

But do not run away just yet…

There is still fun to be had, loads of difficulty options, lots of continues have been added as well as a very generous 10 lives per credit option.

Ghost Blade HD also got a ship/style selector in good old-school tradition.

The insane amount of stuff going on at the same time has to be mentioned too, yes it is a bullet hell game indeed, but look at the shot above, see all those stars?…

Well, it is stuff to pick up… gazillions of them, all over the place all the bloody time.

So what happens if you toss a gazillion pickups on a screen and then put a single bullet on the screen too?, well naturally you DIE instantly as you fly straight into the god damned bullet.. haha, yes it can be just like this in the game. 

But at the same time as you go crazy, you realize that there is a system in all of this…

Thank god for the energy bar in the game, you will learn to dodge stuff over time thanks to the game not being a total pain in the butt. You will have to play it quite a bit to master it and while most enemy patterns in the game are straightforward it is still a very hard game to guess your way through in terms of where the bullets go.

The music and sound in the game stay true to the old school feel of the game and at first, i thought that the sound was ripped from other games, so i put my detective hat on and had a look around to see if i could find anything.

Much to my surprise was that it sounded very similar to the Soldner-X games in my head while playing this game but when i compared them next to each other there were very few similarities.  

The sound is from the same author (Rafael Dyll) though, i didn’t know that before i started looking into this.

It has to be said that i love his style and that the score is awesome and well worth a listen for fans of the style.

The graphics and gameplay are in line with what to expect from a title like this, flashy and there are a lot of explosions to help cover the usual flaws but everything fits here, very good use of colours and style in order to not cramp up the whole screen with “stuff”.

The 2 player mode in the game also works good and a proper winner both in PLAYShare and couch-play due to not being too demanding internet speed wise.

So what else is there to say about this then? is it fun? Will it be a timeless classic?

To me, no i personally think that it is fun but this is one of those titles that will be forgotten over the years sadly, there are so many better titles out there in the same style. One thing though, the PS4 screams for games like this and to get more we mean that we (BH fans) needs to support just about every title that appears.

A brilliant Limited Edition of Ghost Blade HD was released a few months back, i wish i had been paying attention to it before they ran out of copies to sell…..