Dragon Blaze Review

Ah, now this is more like it. Arriving in a clutch of three Psikyo remasters from City Connection, Dragon Blaze is the least ambitious of the bunch by quite a way. It does precious little that other Psikyo shooters haven’t done before, and – if you have any shoot ’em-up experience – it doesn’t deviate much from those either. But it does it all so well, so effortlessly, that we tucked in our legs on the sofa, zoned out, and enjoyed some of the purest of thrills. 

As with all of the City Connection Psikyo re-releases, this is a cracking port. There’s no slowdown or compromises, the graphics look as crisp as they ever did (although the artwork from 2000 is starting to look a little creaky), and there are graphical options to bring it more in line with what you remember on your old CRT. Their game options are welcome too, with the ability to dink up the number of lives or continues, as well as participate on a global highscore table. 

The story is some hokum about needing four magicstones to access a shrine, which will in turn reveal a dragon who has taken your character’s choice of damsel. It’s all an excuse to swing a leg over a dragon and fly it into battle, completing seven levels of carnage and unlock a character-specific end cutscene. In fact, Dragon Blaze does go one better than other Psikyo games here: there are cutscenes for specific co-op permutation, so there’s even more reason to replay than usual. 

We loved flying about on our dragon. Ignoring the obvious coolness of playing guys called Rob and Ian, and swooping around on your own personal dragon, there are some slight differences in how they play. You can press X to dismount and send your dragon forward, locked into place as you mop up enemies around them. It turns out that your human characters can fly without their dragon, and this gives a handy option in battle. Since the dragon cannot be killed when you’re absent from it, it means that you’ve got a guaranteed kill-machine (and shield) dominating the centre of the playfield, and you can just tidy up whatever it cannot. 

There’s the usual character-specific smart bomb, collected from enemies, obliterating what’s left on the screen in a gigantic EMP, or a salvo of fireballs. Red enemies can be shot to drop a power upgrade, and you’ll soon be dominating entire screens with a wide cone of dragon-bullets. Dragon Blaze does what so many other Psikyo games do right: making you an unbalanced death machine, leaving only the occasional window for enemy bullets to get through. 

Psikyo know their way around a boss, and it’s no different here. We’ve always preferred their non-military shooters, as you get more than the usual spaceships and mechs, which can conceptually bleed into each other. You get space turtles, insectoids and – of course – hulking dragons, and they each have their own bullet patterns and weaknesses. Of course, you could just launch a smart bomb into the centre of them and then detach from your dragon for some added damage. The choice is yours. 

It is all entirely predictable and formulaic, particularly if you’ve played the Samurai Aces, Gunbird and Strikers games, which this is entirely similar to. But we don’t care. Psikyo found their formula early in the nineties and stuck to it, with occasional experiments like Zero Gunner 2 and Gunbarich. Dragon Blaze may be the most conventional of them all, but it is also the refinement of their formula. 

If you want the best output from one of the most prolific and successful shooter outfits, then, well, Dragon Blaze is it. 

More so than many other shooters, it’s also built for replay. As mentioned, there are multiple cutscenes to replay, and the entirely awesome cooperative mode leads to its own sequence of ending cutscenes. Levels are short but sweet, meaning you can blitzkrieg to the ending of the seven levels after thirty minutes or so. But rather than be a limitation, Psikyo has turned this into a virtue. Playing as the different dragons is a varied experience, and the achievements reward you for slowly turning up the dial of difficulty. We’re still chasing a full playthrough without touching a Continue. 

Dragon Blaze is not pushing at the boundaries of what shoot ’em-ups can do. Even for Psikyo, who are well known for sticking to a formula, this is one of their most formulaic games. But like ordering the same tikka masala over and over again, simply because you know it’s going to be good, Dragon Blaze delivers a return on the trust you put into it. It’s overblown action, utterly replayable, and with Psikyo’s trademark craftsmanship when it comes to bosses. 

It all adds up to a surprisingly obvious starting point for shooters, or Psikyo shooters in particular. If you want an emblematic specimen of what these games are like, and how good they can be, then Dragon Blaze is the one to pick. 

You can buy Dragon Blaze from the Xbox Store