Aka the real game now.
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0stRanger IF is basically a Hard mode that you unlock after getting 2 million points in the normal game.
It's exceptionally harder, patterns are crazy buffed and modified, enemies shoot way more bullets, are much faster and there might be something more at the end...?
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Got an early access demo (for content creators only) for a new shmup from the ZeroRanger devs!
ZeroRanger was one of the coolest modern shmups, so it's great to see them making something new again. Not sure yet how much they're going to expand this, but what's already there is quite promising. Since it's a short demo they modeled it after a caravan score stage, kinda like what they did with the old ZeroRanger demo.
You have two characters to choose from with different shots and swords.
Stranger 0 has a Star Soldier-like wide shot with a weak sword while Stranger 1 has a forward focus homing shot with a strong sword.
Stranger 0 is better for scoring while Stranger 1 is better for survival.
The sword can cancel most bullets. No bombs in this.
Each five enemies destroyed drops an orb. These increase your shotpower, your current multiplier and i-frames that stack.
Shotpower maxes out at three so without collecting orbs you have about 4 hits before you actually die and game over. Survival is pretty lenient this way but you do lose power and score.
What's really funny to me is that this short demo has more QOL practice options than ZeroRanger ever had. A quick restart, a solid practice mode, you can practice from 7 different points in the stage, and even invincibility.
Scoring consists of three main things:
- Chaining orbs for higher multipliers.
- Cancelling bullets into medals.
- Secrets.
Collecting an orb starts a multiplier for a short amount of time.
Collecting more extends this timer and also keeps doubling the multiplier until a max of x64.
This goes from x2, x4, x8, x16, x32 to x64.
So ideally you want to leave 6 orbs around to then cash in on a high value enemy.
This is extremely hard though because the orbs are very hard to avoid.
Cancelling bullets converts them into medals.
These give a flat bonus but are also worth 500 points each at the end of the stage.
Getting hit makes you lose 1/5th of your current total so not getting hit is important.
You cancel bullets either from destroying one of the orbs with your shot or from enemies that cancel bullets.
Secret bonuses:
1 - Destroy the four initial mid sized ships before they leave the screen.
2 - Destroy all initial large ships.
3 - Destroy all four parts of the big ship before it gets slashed by the boss.
4 - Destroy a certain amount of bonus enemies from the post-midboss section.
5 - Destroy the black hole before it leaves.
6 - Make 5 large ships get slashed and destroyed by the boss.
7 - (IF ONLY) Catch the boss after you defeat them.
The score bonus starts at 8k and doubles for each additional secret you uncover, so you really want to get all of them.
Besides the secret bonuses there are also additional secrets like the cats and the big ships.
There are 10 hidden cats in the stage that you reveal by slashing. Shooting them gives you score per tick up to 2560 each if you don't interrupt your shooting.
If you reveal all 10 of them you also get a 255,000 bonus at the end of the stage.
The big ships are worth 3200 points, but if you destroy both turrets and then destroy the eye that opens they give 6400.
Really fantastic caravan stage. Each checkpoint is like a completely different game in how you score it and it all flows great. Very high skill ceiling too.
The worst thing I can really say about it is that visibility can be quite rough at times.
Balance-wise everything seems fine except for the statue boss on IF lol. That boss just has impossible overlaps and transitions like half the time and it's really silly. Probably something that will get fixed in the full version though.
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