All the way back to Robotron, via Smash TV, and onto the classic Geometry Wars, twin stick shooters have carved a lovely little niche into the annals of videogame history, a micro genre that continues to flourish thanks to developers continuing to produce belters like Stratogun, a superb psychadelia-tinged blaster form Horsefly Games that serves as a kindred spirit and successor to the likes of Bizarre games’ aforementioned classic, and the works of Housemarque Games like Super Stardust and the astonishing Resogun.
The core gameplay loop of Stratogun is fiendishly addictive on a number of levels. Using both analogue sticks you pilot a small craft around a spherical planet, taking on waves of asteroid-y space debris, ominous spinning, slicing blades, and all manner of other high-res sci-fi nasties, each stage on each run culminating in a hard as nails boss encounter. As well as your main weapon you have a few neat tricks to call upon, a smart bomb, a dash move that scythes a path through the enemies and grants temporary invulnerability, and a bullet-time slowdown trigger that gives you a bit of respite amidst the chaos.
You only have three bombs and three dash stocks but some enemies leave behind pickups that replenish these, or top up your precious shields. Your primary guns have a cooldown bar which varies depending on what you are using, so careful management of all of these factors is key in surviving.
Each playthrough earns experience points depending on your performance, which in turn awards points to permanently boost your shield level, spacecraft speed or the power of your ordnance, and there are unlockable craft types and loadout options such as new varieties of smart bomb, different primary weapons and perks that can either buff your performance or even make the game tougher by doing stuff like increasing the frequency of enemies, or make the bosses even harder to take down.
Experimenting with different weapons and spaceships is great fun and unlocking new gear is a genuine thrill. There is also an option to gamble your experience points – if the house wins you lose them all, but come up trumps and you will double them leading to even tastier boosts to your stats.
Stratogun works because the controls are tight, the gameplay is addictive and it looks, sounds and feels right. You weave amongst the armada of flotsam and death-dealing obstacles, making use of the dash to get out of dodge, and timing the use of your screen-clearing crash weapon to eliminate as many enemies as possible in one hit, hoovering up all the item drops in the process, and then waiting for the chaos to unfold again.
At the start you are going to struggle to overcome even the first boss, because at a basic level you are underpowered and the gear you have at the outset is like taking a peashooter into battle. But find some better death-dealing weaponry and get those shields upped and you can eke your way further and further into the game, and each procedurally generated run will last longer, and you will earn more and more precious XP.
It has that “just one more go” vibe, as a quick blast with a morning cuppa threatens to make you late for work as you strive to unlock the latest weapon variant or see what the next boss has to offer. There are a tonne of unlockable achievements and an endless and boss rush mode to get your hands on, further expanding the life of the game.
Stratogun is a beautifully executed piece of work that fully deserves to join the pantheon of twin stick lore, and is going to be a near-permanent fixture on my Steam Deck for some time to come. Bravo.
