Nice and Simple.
At a certain point, there was a shortage of quality bullet hell games on the PS4, but in the last two years, the genre has found a good home on the platform with many excellent titles like Astebreed and Dariusburst Chronicles.
Score Rush Extended follows this trend with a small twist of taking the formula back to the basics.
Dodge bullets, shoot enemies- it’s as simple as that.
MSRP: $11.99
Platforms: PS4
Multiplayer: 4 Player local only co-op and online leader boards
Played: 3~ hours
If you’ve ever played a single twin-stick bullet hell game, you know exactly what to expect.
The ship’s movement is controlled using the left analog stick and projectiles are fired using the right analog stick.
There are bombs that can be used to clear the screen, and a button that can be held to slow the movement of the ship to aid in precise movement.
That’s really all there is to it.
While it seems odd that there aren’t any gimmicks to the tried and true formula, as is the case for basically every other modern game of the genre, it keeps things simple by design in an attempt to keep the experience closer to the old “pure arcade” games.
The visuals are also minimalistic, keeping the designs of both the ships and the enemies to simple shapes. Luckily, it makes good use of colors and I never had much of an issue distinguishing bullets that I had to dodge from my own projectiles.
As for modes of play, there’s the regular mode with mobs of enemies punctuated by bosses or a boss rush mode that has the player challenging the bosses of the game back to back.
There’s local drop-in co-op for up to four players at once, and lastly, an option to play either as a single or two ships connected to each other at once.
DODGE THIS!
Unfortunately, there’s no multiplayer co-op, which would’ve been a nice feature for those who don’t have couch co-op buddies, but at least there’s multiplayer leader boards to compare your scores against those around the world.
Score Rush Extended is very much a one trick pony, but that one trick is a tried and true classic and still enjoyable all these years later. Even though I personally prefer to play bullet hell shooters with mechanics that put a twist to the genre to keep things interesting, the simple and satisfying action, along with its modest asking price, makes Score Rush Extended well worth looking into if you have an itch to dodge a screen full of bullets.
Fun Tidbit – The dual ship mode makes dodging bullets tougher but as long as one ship is left alive, the other ship will keep respawning.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
