Twin-stick shooters are pretty much a must have title on home consoles. They are fun, addictive and give a great sense of accomplishment. Blue Rider by EastAsiaSoft (with developers Ravegan’s partnership) is no exception. The interesting indie title shows some simple yet interesting gameplay mechanics but suffers from a few issues.

The aim of the game is to drive your blue rider and explore through map sized environments, defeating shooting enemies on different tiers and unlocking doors to eventually confront the stage boss. The developers have this really cool 3D aesthetic to the game, it’s easy on the eye and looks very playful and with secret treasures, but it would be nice to have some sort of UI element to tell you where you are, as sometimes by doing 360s you may get lost and have to recur to the old fashion “where there are enemies, it’s a new area” strategy. Maybe it’s just me, but a minimap or a full map with fog of war would be great (or both?).

The game features 9 really cool and different stages, each with their own boss with its unique bullet patterns and gimmicks. Good thing is that throughout stages you can upgrade your weapons by finding the upgrade capsules. Also keep a close eye to your health as enemies tend to do significant damage, but fortunately the game is helpful with the amount of health capsules it drops. All your upgrades can be kept as long as you never get defeated; otherwise you can start the stage again but with your default weapons.

The one thing that seems to be giving a hard time with the game is its shooting, non other than it’s main feature. Bullet tracking with the joysticks feels very stiff and since enemies move in awkward patterns it can prove difficult to aim. It would be nice if it had some sort of aim-assist feature, since I could not find any options setting to configure my joystick sensitivity.

Overall, the game is still quite fun and very challenging; you can try again and again your rough stages and eventually blaze through them, so the whole “starting all over again” isn’t a huge issue since you start over the last stage you completed and most likely know it from top to bottom. I recommend this title to twin-stick shooter fans but again the game would be so much cooler with just a few simple tweaks.

Blue Rider will be available as a physical Limited Edition (2500 units worldwide) in April and sold exclusively at Play-Asia.com for US$29.99. The game is also localized in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English.