Retro-Style Arcade Shmup Rangok Skies Is Blasting Onto Switch

Now, this one looks more promising then the average indie shmup.

I'm interested! Hope it plays as slick as it looks.

Let's get physical, physical.

Dammit, look at how much of the screen is NOT being used. I don’t care how much of a fan of vertical shooters you are, this is a waste of space. There should be an option to remove the borders if you don’t like them. I can’t count how many times I almost bought games like this and stopped dead in my tracks, once I saw the horrendous use of screen space. On a 75” tv, this is blasphemy.

Gives me Classic Cave shmup vibes which is good. Excited for this

aw, yeah. Looks really good.

I am interested in this. Tate mode is the way to play for sure to get rid of the wasted space. That soundtrack is really bumpin.

@Realness it supports vertical, so hopefully in TATE the HUD takes less space.

Also, this looks legit. Just the right amount of arcade cheez in the voiceovers.

I think this is just re-branded Operation Dracula from same developer, which is available on iOS (or some spin-off/different take on it). So it has it definitely has mobile roots, which also explains the TATE orientation.

I have that game on my iPad and it's actually quite fun, definitely not some cheap shovelware mobile title. I'm definitely going to check this out when it's released.

Having just played the demo, I can confirm this is pretty much garbage. Is this a mobile port??? The ship's fire has a really really annoying pew pew sound FX that isn't typical of this era aesthetic at all, and it absolutely ruins the playability. You cannot silence it as then you get no other FX at all. guns also fire a little too slow, despite being auto-fire as you would expect. They don't match with the frantic action. The presentation is pretty good, but main menu screen feels unpolished, again making me think this is a mobile port. If it isn't, then i see no way how anyone could of spent any length of time making a game like this, to allow it to fall at such simplistic hurdles. Avoid.

@GFoyle Just played it, it's crap.

Colour me intrigued.

Looks good. I'll try out the demo soon and see if I side with Gfoyle or YANDMAN, ha ha.

@Steel76 What did you do to get the game running in TATE mode? I initially ran the game in YOKO and it looked fine-ish (blurry resolution), I then turned on TATE mode in the game and that's when things started to go awry. Sides got cut off, even after I turned the orientation in Windows natively. I rebooted the game and everything was still bad. Shut it down again, switch back the landscape and still the sides are being cut off, even though TATE mode is set to off. By sides, I mean half of the menu text that I'm selecting, like "Video Settings". This was all inside the menu, btw, never even tried a level.

On top of all that, the text in the intro flew across the screen way too fast to read any more than a third of it at a time, lol.

@YANDMAN I can only talk about the iOS game Operation Dracula, which seems to be same game re-branded / similar game from same developer. I just tried it on iPad to refresh my memory and I still thought it's pretty good, really frantic action and lot of influences from Cave shooters, especially the first couple DoDonPachi games (not saying it's as good, but the influence is there definitely).

The slower fire rate is not issue on mobile at all, but I think it's because of the touch controls, which means the movement is super fast, almost instant, so you don't really even how fast the ship shoots as you can move at right place to kill things fast anyway. In OP Dracula, the special shot ("charge shot") is very important and you end up using it a ton, which makes the main shot speed less of an issue too.

Anyway, I like the fast paced and relentless action in OP Dracula, there is a lot going on from first seconds. Graphics are decent as well. I haven't played it that much, but from my experience, the bosses take a bit too long to kill and there is not a lot of phases in them, so it becomes a bit boring to after a while (this is also a problem in another Dodonpachi clone, Ghost Blade HD), so that is a minus.

I'm interested to see final version will be on consoles, I wouldn't be surprised if the transfer from mobile to consoles and traditional controls do not work that well. I'm probably going to check it out myself at least.

@GFoyle having something that looks a lot like something else, but is still terrible, to me is even more annoying. This game was clearly made by people with no understanding or love for the genre, only an understanding to make cash. The gun sound FX alone is an absolute deal-breaker. It's dreadful. If you want to waste your money to find out that is entirely your call of course.

@YANDMAN I have to disagree with you on this. There are plenty of those shmups out there, which have made by people who don't understand the genre, some pretty horrible ones too, but I wouldn't put this one in that category at all. It's definitely lacks originality, but it copies a lot of the right things well enough what comes to pacing, bullet colors, enemy bullet speeds, overall destruction, length of stages etc.

I tried the demo on Steam and it definitely has issues with the sound mix and it's very different from what the iOS game has (it has some differences to the iOS game, like lack of bomb, but it's still quite close to it). The iOS game has much stronger explosion effect in the mix, but you main shot with that weak fx is mixed really low, so I didn't get bothered at all as it's not in your face. Hopefully they do something about those sounds for the final version of the game. It didn't have the greatest input lag either on Steam, so that's what I'm most worried, especially on Switch.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think it is/going to be anything top tier, more like one of the better mid tier shmups out there on the system (if they get the technical aspects right).

EDIT: shmups don't make money, so if that's you goal, better to select some other genre

this game is fairly blatantly stealing assets from Cave games and other arcade shmups, tracing over existing designs and calling them their own. shameful.
https://twitter.com/KiwiSTG/status/1304355499312214016

@Steel76
I thought about re-installing, but said screw it because the issues were so numerous. Seeing the plagiarism claim made me just want to ignore this now, too. As far as the speed, I have a 144hz monitor too, so that makes sense. Thanks.