Takotan

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1

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Review:

Takotan is a family-friendly Shmup released on PC in 2019, then ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game is set in a version of Earth being invaded by aliens, with the only hope to fight them off being a… flying, bullet-spewing octopus. Yeah, this is definitely one of those games where you’re not meant to think too hard about the plot.

Takotan features a wonderful presentation with colorful, nicely-animated 2D pixel art backed by some nice chiptune music, which combine to give this game a wonderful retro feel, and there’s even a cute heavily-digitized announcer heard every now and then. There’s nothing outstanding here, but everything looks and sounds great.

Compared to most games in this genre, Takotan is remarkably easy. Players can take numerous hits before they lose a life, and this game’s signature ability is a dodge move that lets them briefly move into the background to avoid enemy attacks. There aren’t any penalties for taking damage as long as your “shield” number isn’t reduced to zero, and after fighting each level’s end boss this meter is reset to full. That’s not to say that there’s no challenge here, as players will soon enough learn that the dodge move is not just an optional suggestion, and they’ll want to make frequent use of it if they don’t want their health to become whittled down by unavoidable hazards and enemy fire.

Still, I know there’s a segment of the Shmup audience who will see the words “easy Shmup” as sacrilege, and I tend to disagree – I think even a relatively easy game can still be delightful if it’s engaging and interesting throughout. And here we run into problems.

In addition to the standard weapons fire, Takotan can pick up and use various weapon upgrades, but unfortunately you can only use one at a time and keep a pickup for a second weapon in reserve. Even more unfortunately, almost all of the weapons in this game are outright terrible, either having horrible range, extremely ineffective power, or absurdly slow fire rates. I completely understand wanting to balance out weapons so that players don’t just steamroll through enemies, but when virtually every weapon in the game makes you feel weak, I think you’re doing something wrong, especially in a Shmup. If they wanted the game to be easy, I would have preferred more competent weapons and less health.

In addition, even the game’s signature dodge mechanic is poorly-executed, with the game not indicating to players when its cooldown has ended, meaning you’ll find yourself repeatedly using the button and having nothing happen. For that matter, the game often doesn’t indicate when you’re damaging stronger enemies, making you wonder if this particular enemy is invincible.

Because of its lacking weaponry and poor visual communication to the player, Takotan goes from an adorable family-friendly Shmup to something too tedious and frustrating to be enjoyable. Even if you’re looking for an easier Shmup, you may want to skip this one.

tl;dr – Takotan is a family-friendly Shmup where Earth is being invaded by aliens, and the only hope to fight them off is a flying octopus. This game has a lovely retro 2D pixel art presentation, but unfortunately all of the game’s weapons feel weak and ineffective, and this game does a poor job indicating things like when your dodge button cooldown is over. The result makes this a game with flaws that I feel outweigh its strengths.

Grade: C

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