Macross -Shooting Insight-

Genre: Shmup / 2-Stick Shooter

Players: 1, Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!

Macross -Shooting Insight- is a Shmup with 2-Stick Shooter sections released in 2024 on PC and ported to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2025. Featuring an interdimensional time-traveling plot that’s clearly just a contrivance to make the game’s premise work, this game brings together characters and transforming plane-mech hybrid machines from numerous entries in the Macross franchise of manga and anime titles to face an enemy that threatens them all.

Given the contrived plot, I’m not sure how excited Macross fans will be for this game, but players who don’t follow the franchise will feel completely left in the dark, as the game’s story makes no attempt to explain who these characters are, what conflicts drive them, or why we should care about them. And despite this, these static story cutscenes drone on and on and on, and I’m extremely thankful they’re skippable.

The presentation here has some genuinely good elements, including a lot of Japanese-language voice acting for the various characters, and songs from throughout the anime. There are also some decent 3D visuals here that unfortunately get a bit overly-busy for the fast-paced gameplay, and I even noticed a bit of slowdown in places.

The gameplay here switches between the different gameplay styles depending on whether you’re fighting in fighter jet form or mech form, with the former being a traditional Shmup, and the latter being a 2-Stick Shooter, with each happening at designated points within the game’s levels. This adds some decent variety to the game to keep things interesting. In both forms, there’s a nice dodge feature that’s a surprisingly major focus here, and this helps to set this game apart from others in the genre.

Unfortunately, your ship feels underpowered and sluggish, making it frustrating and tedious just to move around and fight in this game. What’s more, boss enemies often don’t forecast attacks well enough for your slow ship to move out of the way, resulting in a death that forces you to restart the entire level.

In the end, I’m not sure who Macross -Shooting Insight- is for, other than the most die-hard of Macross franchise fans. Its focus on dodging is fairly unique for the Shmup genre, but everything else about it is pretty unsatisfying, and non-Macross fans will be lost with the story elements the game doesn’t explain, but that are also clearly contrived to force together characters from different times and realities. In any case, unless you’re that die-hard Macross fan, you’ll want to skip this one.

tl;dr – Macross -Shooting Insight- is a Shmup with 2-Stick Shooter segments that brings together characters from throughout the Macross franchise. Unfortunately, beyond a surprisingly uncommon focus on dodging, there’s little about this game that stands out or excels within the genre, and I don’t think its license tie-in does it any favors either. Unless you’re a massive Macross fan, you’ll want to skip this.

Grade: C-

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