Jamestown+

Genre: Bullet Hell Shmup

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Jamestown+ is a Bullet Hell Shmup originally released on PC in 2011, and it does some truly interesting things with the genre, with its variety of unlockable ships that all bring different game mechanics to the table, its unique and strategic “Vaunt” system, and even its setting and story, this is a game that truly wants to do some interesting things with the genre.

That all starts with the presentation, where Jamestown+ features 2D graphics with a great amount of detail, imagination, and some silky-smooth animation in places. Sadly, this isn’t consistent – not everything gets the same level of care, but it’s frequent enough that quality shines throughout the game. This comes with a pretty good soundtrack with a lot of good militaristic orchestral music with a lot of percussion.

However, the most standout part of this game’s presentation has to be its setting and story – an alternate 17th century where steampunk-powered European powers are colonizing… Mars and the moon, apparently. You’ll fight a multitude of strange mechanical Spanish ships bearing period-inspired regalia, allied with alien creatures of numerous varieties, and you’ll be doing so as various famous figures of the colonial era, like Walter Raleigh and John Smith. It’s a bizarre mix of old-school and futuristic that’s pretty fresh and definitely makes for some interesting battles throughout the game.

As for the gameplay itself, over the course of the game, players will unlock multiple ships, each which makes use of a unique mechanic. One has a special weapon that fires a constant energy beam, but that slows down your ship when it is use, another has balls of plasma that are powering up while you’re not using them, and another allows you to use the special weapon button to redirect the ship’s main gun. This variety is welcome and gives players plenty of choices as they play through the game, and I’m sure different players will find different ships to select as favorites. However, what each of the ships have in common is the “Vaunt mode”.

When players take down enemies, enemies drop cash for players to collect, and these coins fill up a meter. When full, players can unleash a “Vaunt”, a brief bullet-deflecting shield followed by a temporarily powered-up weapon and a point bonus, with these latter bonuses extending as players grab more coins. This provides the game with a lot of its strategy – ideally, you’ll be continuously vaunting to build up your score, but you may want to save a Vaunt to shield yourself during a particularly nasty volley of enemy attacks. And the enemies here are nicely varied, with some really inventive bosses.

This game is also clever about its multiplayer mode, which conveniently color-codes the different players’ ships and weaponry, and enables the group to keep going so long as they don’t all die at the same time, respawning after a short bit so long as at least one other player is alive. This approach gives the multiplayer mode even more strategy and requires players to be mindful not only of themselves, but the other players, as they take risks on the stage.

This game is split up into individual levels that can be played and replayed in any order after being unlocked, with players individually selecting the difficulty level in each, and higher difficulty levels unlocking more. This is an interesting approach, though it does mean that players will likely be replaying the same stages repeatedly. That said, every jump in difficulty level makes the level noticeably harder, so players may well need the practice on these stages to keep getting better.

Another frustration comes in the form of the game’s story, which… while amusing at first, becomes annoying seeing a stage’s story for the umpteenth time when you select it, and you’ll just want to skip to the action. Players can skip these story bits, but it does take a moment, and putting up with that repeatedly becomes a real annoyance.

Oh, one other thing – I saw others claiming that you can’t play this game in handheld mode without detaching the Joy-Cons. That simply isn’t true – I don’t know if a patch fixed this or what, but this isn’t a concern in the game at this point.

All in all, I had an absolute blast with Jamestown+. While I wouldn’t put it quite on the same level as Ikaruga, it brings a lot to the table. The variety of ships makes for plenty of gameplay opportunities, the vaunt system brings an excellent element of strategy, the multiplayer mode is fantastic, and throughout the game there’s plenty of variety and creativity to keep players engaged. However, the game’s repetitive structure is bound to frustrate some, and the intrusive story bits go from being clever and amusing to annoying pretty quickly. Still, if you’re a fan of Bullet Hell Shmups, Jamestown+ should be considered a must-have on the Switch.

tl;dr – Jamestown+ is a Bullet Hell Shmup that has players blasting 17th century colonial European troops and aliens in outer space. The bonkers setting comes with a fantastic presentation, some wonderful and clever game mechanics that add a lot of strategy, plenty of variety and imagination, and a superb co-op mode. It’s a shame the game’s structure makes you re-play levels repeatedly and forces its story on you over and over again, but overall this is one of the best games in this genre on the Switch.

Grade: A-

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