Black Bird

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1

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Review:

Black Bird is a Shmup with a truly bizarre and unique presentation that’s both comic and dark, silly and unsettling. And despite that the gameplay is about as straightforward as it gets, in recent years this may well be the game that most had me reacting with a perplexed feeling of “what the heck am I even playing?”

The game follows the story… I think… of a little girl who dies and transforms into an egg that hatches a giant black bird…’s ugly head. Which then begins to spit out bubbles to destroy all of civilization… with said civilization being peopled by goofy big-nosed men with an anachronistic arsenal of weaponry.

Yeah, this game is all over the place in tone, and this is reflected in the presentation, which combines silly, cartoony characters with an urban dystopian world rendered in Earth tones. The game’s music is similarly bizarre, seeming to feature some sort of Eastern European men’s choir or… yeah, I don’t even know. If this game’s creators were looking to create something that looks and feels like absolutely no other game, or anything, really, then I guess they succeeded.

And yet, despite this, the gameplay is extremely simple. You fly around on a horizontally looping level, fighting off enemies, and taking out fortified enemy positions, sorta’ like the old games Defender and Choplifter, minus the “rescuing people” bit. Defeat all of the targets, and you fight a screen-filling boss enemy. Your shots are affected by gravity, and you can earn screen-clearing bombs, and that’s it.

The simple gameplay doesn’t mean the game is boring, though. Simply seeing all the wacky new enemies keeps things going, although it’s apparent that much of the reason to keep going forward is to see just what the game does next out of pure morbid curiosity.

If you feel like you’ve seen everything, Black Bird will have you thinking again. It doesn’t do anything especially new in the gameplay department, but the presentation is really bizarre and unique. Whether it’s something that appeals to you is really up to you.

tl;dr – Black Bird is a Shmup that doesn’t do anything truly unique in terms of gameplay, but its presentation is so bizarre that it compels you to see more. Not a game for everyone, but worth a look if you want to see something really different.

Grade: C+

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