Cattle Crisis sees aliens making off with our precious cows, so you’ll need to gun those ships down to rescue our beloved bovine buddies.
The game only features a single level, but you’d best believe I have not been able to complete it yet as it makes the most of its brief playtime. Enemies come at you hard and fast, each covering the screen in various bullet patterns that overlap with only a little room to spare. Thankfully it’s just enough to scoot your ship to safety most of the time if you’re precise, but I am unfortunately not particularly precise with my controller movements the more frantic things get on the screen. Even with generous checkpoints and a single level, my shaky hands don’t make this easy.
Like most spaceship shooters, there’s some extra powerful boosts you can put to smart use. As you down ships, you will release the kidnapped cows that are inside some of them. Collecting these cows increases your Hyper Bar, and once that’s halfway full, you can shift into Hyper Mode and really blast your enemies. Taking a hit in this mode won’t kill you, but you will drop out of Hyper Mode (and it’s smarter to end it early by hitting the Hyper Mode button again to launch a screen-clearing bomb). You can earn way more cows (and a higher score) by shooting foes point-blank, so it’s up to you how much risk you want to take to get into Hyper Mode faster and crank up that score.
Cattle Crisis is short but offers a great deal of challenge and possibilities for high scores through careful risk-taking. Just the same, it offers a handful of checkpoints you can start from (even though it’s just one stage) if you feel your shooter skills aren’t amazing (like mine). It’s sharp, sounds great, and handles well, creating a nice bite-sized shooter package.
Cattle Crisis is available now on itch.io (and you can try it out in your browser).
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