Tatsujin Extreme is the new entry in the vertical shoot’em up Tatsujin series that was announced a couple of weeks ago by Tatsujin Tokyo, a company founded by Yuge Masatoshi who developed Tatsujin when he was working at Toaplan.
The game has been showed at Tokyo Game Show 2023 and today the Japanese site Game Spark has published their first impressions of the game.
Tatsujin Extreme is a completely new chapter in the Tatsujin series and although the gameplay is still in 2D, the player’s aircraft, enemies and backgrounds use 3D polygon graphics while the screen ratio now is 16:9 to match the modern displays.
There are 4 different type of shots available, one more than the original Tatsujin : the Power Shot, the classic 3-way shot, Thunder Laser, a laser shot that sticks to enemies, the Tatsujin Shot, a green bullet that travels upward the screen and the Homing Shot, all projectiles hit a specific enemy; the power-up system didn’t change and after collecting 3 items of the same colour the shot will become stronger and expands the range of the attack.
The shoot feeling is not much different from Tatsujin for Megadrive and the gameplay is very similar : it’s important to change the weapon according to the enemies, especially with final stage bosses, and through the levels is possible to shoot down containers which grants the player with extra bombs or speeding up the aircraft.
Despite being a vertical shoot’em up displayed on a 16:9 screen there are not so much problems : the wide play area compared to the original 3:4 (TATE) screen allows the player to dodge better the incoming enemy bullets and the background, due to the 3D graphics, slightly scrolls when the aircraft is moving left or right towards the screen border giving a sense of depth.
The demo used at Tokyo Game Show showed only the first level until the boss fight and according to the developers the game is only at 20% of development so the gameplay can still be improved and some flaws fixed.
Tatsujin Extreme is actually planned to be released for PlayStation 5 but more platforms could be announced in the next months, meanwhile you can watch the first trailer which shows the 4 different shots in action and all the stage bosses available.
Source : text and pictures from Game Spark