Review - Dogyuun is an arcade-exclusive vertical shooter from Toaplan somehow related to Truxton, Truxton 2 and Batsugun, although I don't know exactly how.

Anyways, at least visually, Dogyuun has the same graphical style found in these other Toaplan shooters. You can expect to find gorgeous graphics with very detailed backgrounds, big bosses, plenty of eye-catching parallax scrolling and very nice effects for the weapons which definitely have that typical Toaplan touch.

The BGMs sound like most Japanese shooters of the early 1990s although they are never out of place and actually they wonderfully set the right tempo to the frenetic action.

The most original aspect of the game is in the weapon system although it is initially pretty unintuitive. When I played the game for the first time, I reached level 5 and then basically gave up because of the ultra-hard difficulty of the game. My ship seemed to always be underpowered and picking up additional power ups didn't seem to increase the strength of my weapons much.

Occasionally I was able to use smart bombs but not always. I later understood that picking up some ship add-on granted me either the ability to greatly increase my speed for amazing dodging maneuvers or to be able to drop a somewhat limited in range smart bomb.

Anyway, I was so concentrated on trying not to die that I actually paid little attention to the weapon system. I couldn't believe that Dogyuun was so hard. Dying sent me back at the last check point and some bosses (level 4 in particular) were simply hell on earth! After a couple hours of play, I temporarily gave up on the game to try to find useful tactics online (was I missing something?). I was definitely missing something since I had no clue that by plugging in a second controller I could capture the second player ship and double my firepower, Galaga style! So not only my firepower doubled in no time, but in 2 players mode, when losing a ship, the game continues from where you last died and not from the last check-point. So from being an ultra-tough shooter, Dogyuun became a pretty easy shmup…I was able to breeze through the whole game in no time although it felt a bit like cheating.

Unfortunately, there is too much difference between the difficulty level in 1 player and 2 players mode. I just wish there was some kind of middle-ground between the difficulty in the two modes but there isn't.

As things stand, Dogyuun is a competent shooter with a great idea that should have been implemented better. The concept of combining 2 ships into one and double the firepower is great but in this case, it waters down the challenge. Aside from this, Dogyuun is an otherwise excellent shooter!

Bottom line: Interesting 2-players mechanic but the solo experience is too unbalanced. 7/10