Pink bullets are everywhere! Rolling Gunner + Overpower is finally on the Playstation after a release on the Switch last year. In fact, Switch players have had access to the original Rolling Gunner since 2019 as well, so having ININ Games drop this little horizontal gem of a bullet hell shmup onto the Playstation is a welcome release. Mebius has created an interesting system with Rolling Gunner + Overpower that maximizes scoring potential for those who are so inclined and provide some fun gameplay for the rest of us. However, you’re not getting a single game here but two! Rolling Gunner + Overpower also gives you the original Rolling Gunner, selectable with the L and R buttons on the Playstation!
Naturally, there’s an actual backstory for Rolling Gunner which is your average science fiction shlock – humanity’s last hope, evil compters, yadda yadda yadda. The visuals are cool and the story is entertaining, which is nice. At this point the plots in most shmups are simply excuses to have stylized graphics and that’s perfectly fine since Rolling Gunner looks cool as all heck. Honestly, you won’t even notice the backgrounds at first though, since the sheer volume of content on-screen at any given time is exceptional.
Rolling Gunner is a fairly straightforward horizontal shmup and it is remarkably challenging! You have a standard faster shot and a charged shot for larger enemies. Using the right weapon at the right time is important here because you’ll need to clear enemies fast before they blanket the screen with bullets! You’ve also got a bomb that burns across the entire screen, wiping out the opposition. Unfortunately, if you take a hit, the game auto-bombs for you, wasting a bomb and you’ll definitely need them.
In addition to the main weapons, you’ve also got an option that trails you around. It’s fairly challenging to align properly but you can hold a button down to lock it into place once it’s where you’d like. This ‘rolling gun’ helps you kill those hard-to-reach enemies that sneak up on you from all directions, but you’d better watch those fire patterns before you get overwhelmed! You build up a bar to drop hyper attacks and a key strategy is timing their use on bosses to drive rank up rapidly and maximize your scores. Keep those hypers going and you’ll see the game shift quickly!
Bosses are even more challenging in Rolling Gunner, with dense fire blanketing the screen and you’ll be thankful for the glowing green dot that shows you exactly where your hit box is. Don’t sneeze though or you might flick the stick and die! There’s another mechanic here with the medals that drop from enemies too. Collect enough and you rank up, making the game more challenging and driving your score through the stratosphere! The six stages in Rolling Gunner will definitely test your mettle and chances are good that you’ll go through a fair number of continues before you master either the stages or the ranking system! It’s a fun game with a lot of challenge for the dedicated shmup fanatic. That’s not all that’s on this release however!
Rolling Gunner Overpower looks like the original Rolling Gunner, presenting as a standard horizontal shmup at first. You’ll quickly find out however that this is a decidedly non-standard interface that might challenge your fingers. That’s because this is a twin-stick shooter as well as a bullet-hell! Your ship is controlled by the left stick and your option rolls around your ship with the right stick, hence the name Rolling Gunner. Because of the dual stick configuration of the game, shoulder buttons are required to control firing and hyper attacks. This is a bit challenging on the PS4 controller, depending on the size of your hands because the constant firing necessitates a death grip on those shoulder buttons.
In addition to your main gun, there are two firing patterns for your rolling gun, a wider spread shot and a focused burst. Each pattern delivers different scoring based on how it’s used and the two are designed to complement each other. The spread shot is useful to eliminate the waves of popcorn enemies before they can launch a horde of tiny bullets at you and the focus shot is generally more useful for quickly eliminating the larger opponents before they drop more complex patterns.
There’s more to Overpower than just moving the option to fire. Unlike Rolling Gunner, your option also absorbs enemy fire so you’ll have to balance your use between offense and defense as you struggle through the increasingly dense enemy fire. The option is fairly large and most bullets are easy to block but when ships are attacking from all directions, the gameplay becomes frantic on later levels. Note the life bar here as well. Instead of bombing, you can take multiple hits per ship, a distinct change from Rolling Gunner!
Once you’ve been playing for a while, you’ll also notice that there are medals dropping from enemies as you kill them. Hordes of medals in fact, in green, yellow, and red much like the original game. Those medals also represent both score and rank. Collecting them raises your score, but they also increase your rank if used correctly, making the game more challenging as you progress through the stages. The rank systems in both games take some practice to master and they’re definitely not identical so pay attention to your score from time to time, especially when you know you’ve thrown a run!
Hypers are short-lived in Rolling Gunner Overpower, lasting for a handful of seconds so timing them to exploit the medal system and maximize your rank is important, but hoarding them won’t benefit you either. There’s a charge bar that slowly builds as you kill enemies, and once it’s full, you can trigger a hyper with a shoulder button, letting off an insane blast which cancels out enemy fire, converts it all to medals and rapidly increases your rank. If you’re clever and practice a bit, you can exploit the rise in rank to drive your bar to increase faster and trigger a second hyper, maxing out your rank and massively boosting scores as well.
Make no mistake, Rolling Gunner Overpower is all about score as well, allowing you to attain scores in the multiple billions relatively easily. The initial difficulty is low as well, thanks in part to the rank system so the game is remarkably approachable for players of all skill levels. As long as you don’t boost your rank too much, the game stays fairly easy, allowing you to block most incoming fire and decimate the enemy. This variable difficulty means that even if you’re intimidated by the idea of bullet hell games, you can get a decent feel for them and have a good time, unlike the higher difficulty level of the original Rolling Gunner. In case you’re not sure, during the course of this review the first two playthroughs resulted in no miss and not a single hit taken in the first two stages. By the time you get to the third stage though, things heat up a bit regardless of rank so learning the ins and outs of the firing system and mechanics of the game is highly recommended.
The soundtrack in Rolling Gunner + Overpower is solid. It’s the usual sort of frenetic high-energy electronic music that you’d expect from a shmup like this with bullets of all shapes, sizes, and patterns blazing at you from vibrant multicolored enemies and huge bosses. And those brightly colored ships are all 3D with solid and serviceable character designs across the board. Sure, there could have been a bit more stylized art shoved into Rolling Gunner but the fact is you’d barely see it if there was, especially between the density of fire patterns and the profound numbers of enemies. As it is, you barely see the backgrounds in most levels since you’re constantly on the offensive and even your firing patterns cover most of the screen. The mini-cinemas at the end of each level are wicked cool too, and over far to o rapidly. If you’re a shmup fan, you’re used to being teased like this though.
Probably the worst thing about Overpower is the control scheme. Relegating firing patterns and hypers to the shoulder buttons while you control both the ship and its option is definitely not the most ergonomic choice, especially on the PS4 controller. Between holding fire buttons down, switching to R2 to burst and then immediately transitioning back and forth between a spread shot and a sustained bust makes gameplay more challenging than it should be and at worst, moderately unpleasant. This might have something to do with the size of a player’s hand though (or the amount of carpal tunnel they have in some of our cases). Either way, using both sticks and no face buttons while using all the shoulder buttons to attack doesn’t feel as natural as it should and that’s definitely a small strike against the game.
There’s no question that Rolling Gunner + Overpower gives you a fun pair of shmups that operate on several levels simultaneously. Between the option firing patterns, medal collection, hyper attacks, and ranking system, mastery will definitely be a long time coming here. However, there’s plenty to enjoy with six stages of action to blast your way through and an online leaderboard that shows you exactly how much you’ve failed to stack up against other players worldwide (unless you’re one of those incredibly skilled people with the reflexes and precision of a god). For $30, you’re not getting an incredibly long game, but the replay value is always key in shmups and Rolling Gunner + Overpower has a fairly steep learning curve if you’re trying to maximize your score! If you’ve been craving a horizontal shmup, now’s the time and Rolling Gunner + Overpower is definitely worth yours!
This review is based on a digital copy of Rolling Gunner + Overpower provided by the publisher. It was played on a PS4 Pro using a 55” Sony 1080p TV. Rolling Gunner Overpower is also available for Nintendo Switch.