Grand Brix Shooter

Genre: Bullet Hell Shmup

Players: 1

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Review:

Grand Brix Shooter is a Bullet Hell Shmup released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2019. This game has players flying a spaceship designed to look like it’s build out of Lego bricks, and fighting other spaceships with a similarly brick-like design.

The game’s visuals use a combination of 3D models for ships, simple geometric shapes for projectiles, and 2D painted backgrounds. This works, but each of these elements is pretty unimpressive – the ships are flat, untextured, and not lit in any sort of impressive way; the backgrounds are repetitive and uninspired, and projectiles glow in a way that can make it difficult to see your way between them when the battle gets particularly heated. Nothing that’s a deal-breaker, but nothing great either.

On the gameplay side of things, this is just a solid, well-made Bullet Hell Shmup. There’s a decent selection of upgradeable weapons you can pick up, with each one becoming up to two levels stronger after picking up stars enemies drop, with a third temporary super-powered form after that. The controls work well enough and it’s fun to move around, and there’s a decent enough variety of enemies. The game doesn’t do anything truly revolutionary with the genre, but it’s a fun entry in the genre nonetheless.

Having said that, this game is deceptively hard. Your ship has only three hits and that’s it. Players can continue the last level they lost on… but with only one hit left. This means that Grand Brix Shooter isn’t a particularly good choice for new players to the genre. Also, I should note that this game has a terrible, long-winded story about a robot abducting a child to fight for them (perhaps inspired by The Last Starfighter). Suffice it to say, this story is completely disposable.

Still, while it’s not without its flaws, and it doesn’t do anything groundbreaking, players looking for a solid Shmup should find Grand Brix Shooter to be surprisingly entertaining, especially for a game that regularly goes on sale for $2. If you’re a fan of Shmups, take my advice and give the game a try the next time it goes on sale.

tl;dr – Grand Brix Shooter is a Bullet Hell Shmup where players fight with spaceships designed to look like they’re built out of Lego bricks. This is a solid entry in the genre, albeit a deceptively tough one. And while it doesn’t do anything super-inventive or revolutionary, fans of the genre should find it to be well worth a look.

Grade: B

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