Demon Throttle

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the physical-only bundle The Doinksoft Collection, along with Gato Roboto and Gunbrella.)

Demon Throttle is a Shmup released on Nintendo Switch in 2022 only in physical form, something that is strangely a part of the game’s marketing push. I suppose developer Doinksoft and publisher Devolver Digital are banking on this forced scarcity to drive up sales of the game. Anyway, this game puts players in the role of a cowboy and a vampiress chasing after a gang of demons who stole the vampiress’s chalices and “kissed” the cowboy’s wife.

The characters and story are one of the more delightful parts of this game, with the cowboy’s delightfully naive demeanor and the vampiress’s emotional outbursts making for some truly great interactions. This accompanies a colorful retro 2D pixel art style designed to look like an 8-bit era game, along with a chiptune soundtrack and some wonderfully muffled digitized voice clips for the characters. This is a great example of how you do retro-style nostalgia.

The gameplay itself is mostly very good too, with solo players able to swap between the two characters to take advantage of their strengths – the cowboy shoots straight and can unload four shots before reloading, while the vampiress has a split shot that only shoots twice before needing to pause for a short moment. And as these characters are walking through the game’s auto-scroll areas on foot, they can dodge enemy shots by jumping over them, and must take out obstacles barring their way by shooting them. There are even some great boss fights here to keep things interesting.

The problem is unfortunately the challenge level. Each of the two characters can take only four hits before dying, and losing both before completing a stage will make for a permanent game over and a need to restart from the beginning. This feels needlessly difficult, and it takes what is otherwise a highly enjoyable and creative entry in the genre and makes it tedious and frustrating as you must replay the first few stages over and over again whenever you die and need to restart.

I can’t help but feel like Demon Throttle deliberately makes things difficult for players, and I don’t see any good reason why. Why make this game physical-only? Why the perma-death and need to restart from the beginning? If it wasn’t for these issues, I’d likely be singing the praises of this game, but as it is, I can only say that this game will likely only be enjoyed by the most skilled and patient fans of the Shmup genre.

tl;dr – Demon Throttle is a Shmup where players blast away enemies and scenery as a cowboy or a vampiress. The presentation and story here are great, and this game has some fun mechanics and good boss design that could have made it a great entry in the genre. The problem is that the game is punishingly difficult, and the refusal to release this game in digital format is similarly inexplicable and limiting. As a result, only the most die-hard fans of the genre will likely want to get this game.

Grade: C-

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