Based on the popular musical mecha anime franchise, MACROSS -Shooting Insight- sends you on a mission to rescue the missing songstresses. It promises an exciting multi-perspective shoot ’em up that brings in plenty of characters from the various Macross series.
Zero to Delta
MACROSS -Shooting Insight- brings together the five main pilots from Macross Zero, Plus, Seven, Frontier, and Delta, along with their songstresses and other singers.
A rather simple story is told through visual novel style scenes where you can play as any of the five pilots. It’s very much for fans of Macross and probably won’t appeal to anyone else. A shadowy figure has created a rift in space-time intending to kidnap those with the power of song for research. Unfortunately for her, others were caught up in the rift and are trying to rescue them. Quite a few characters that fans of the anime will recognize find themselves on the Macross Seven, using it as their base to search for their kidnapped friends.
Enemies from various times and places have also found themselves caught up in the space-time rift, which leads to situations like Shin from Macross Zero fighting in space, which wasn’t possible in his time, or Hayate from Macross Delta fighting the Vajra, who humans made peace with eight years ago from his perspective. The scenes are sometimes a little choppy, abruptly coming to an end, but there are plenty of nice moments for fans of the series, even if there’s nothing substantial here. You can see interactions between characters who’d never be able to meet, someone recognizing a friend’s great-granddaughter, and reactions to new enemies or technology.
Playing MACROSS -Shooting Insight- as each character gives a slightly different version of the story, but it’s mostly these enjoyable (if unimportant) scenes that change. The overall plot remains the same.
Flying Dogs
Battles in MACROSS -Shooting Insight- are quite varied, with stages split into sections based around where the mecha transforms or gameplay otherwise changes. It has parts of levels that are standard shoot ’em up style with left to right and bottom to top directions. You can transform and move in all directions somewhat freely to take out objectives on some levels. Occasionally, there are even parts with a 3D view with the camera behind you, where you need to shoot enemies coming closer. And of course, there are multi-phase bosses.
I enjoyed having the gameplay change every so often as it helped allow the game stay engaging across the included ten stages. There were plenty of objectives throughout too, such as destroying jammers along the way, timed destruction of other objectives, and collecting iconic items from the series for gallery completion. I usually don’t care too much about picking up non-functional collectables, but there was some amusement in finding things like the Nyan Nyan Tuna Buns and Windermerian Apples.
In addition to the story mode, there’s a mode to replay specific levels, an arcade mode with no continues, a boss rush mode, and one to fight against boss pilots.
You can choose to play as any of the five pilots. They all play slightly differently, with different stats (including some who are just outright higher) and different shot patterns. Each felt unique to me.
MACROSS -Shooting Insight- has quite a few interesting mechanics. A mechanic I particularly liked was destroying jammers to connect to the missing songstresses, who then briefly appear to sing some of the best tunes from their respective series’. As well as each song having temporary practical benefits such as evasion up, attack up, and enemy HP down, there’s just something cool about moments like fighting a boss to Sheryl Nome singing Northern Cross. Some mechanics are simple, such as spinning to very briefly become invulnerable and weave through bullets, a sort of mechanic not common to this genre. Others are more complex, such as including a missile lock-on which is slower to use than the regular shot and requires getting closer, but applies a multiplier to the score when enemies are destroyed using it in succession. This adds a nice level of risk versus reward, as the safer way is to hang back and just use the regular shot.
What ‘Bout My Star?
While MACROSS -Shooting Insight- sounds great at first, there are unfortunately a number of things that bring the experience down significantly.
The main issue is that it’s just incredibly difficult, even on the easiest of the five difficulty modes. It feels like it’s aimed not just at Macross fans, but ones who are also hardcore shoot ’em up enthusiasts. Even then, it can seem unfair at times.
I’ll preempt this by saying that there are all sorts of almost cheat-like options to enable. They don’t work in all modes, but for most of the game, you can adjust your health between 50% to 200% and turn on two degrees of health regeneration. Understandably this disables the leaderboards, but the game will let you do it. By default though, health remains constant between levels, so each level wears you down. Each time you get hit adds a lot of damage. Some levels have background effects that get distracting and some enemies are invulnerable until they fully get in position, so it can be hard to tell what is and isn’t a threat. On top of this, whenever the songs activate a colorful border covers a lot of the screen blocking some of the view. In one boss fight, this is particularly a pain since they often go to a corner to shoot.
There’s just too much opportunity to take damage in ways that feel like they can’t be avoided, and doing so has too much of an impact.
Listen to My Song
While I have my complaints about the gameplay, in terms of graphics MACROSS -Shooting Insight- is a delight to see (outside of the few issues highlighted where they interfere with gameplay).
The character sprites are great representations of the characters and the backgrounds nicely show off a few places in the ship and nearby. The models of the valkyries (the mechas) are particularly detailed and can be unlocked and viewed as 3D models in a gallery. There’s also an art gallery with quite a lot to unlock. This includes unique pieces of art for the game, which I imagine fans will love. Some of my favorites were the story completion images.
The sound was a bit more of a mixed experience. While the songs were all great and some of the most popular ones were included, some choices were made around dialogue that lessened my enjoyment of the experience. During the visual novel style scenes, outside of a few occasional phrases, most lines of speech are narrated with brief utterances such as ‘Eh’, ‘Ah’, and ‘Oi’ rather than being fully voiced. I can only imagine this was to remain on a lower budget, but it doesn’t sound great. In battles, there’s also a fully narrated ongoing voiced chat between the pilot and other characters. This would be great, except the subtitles are in the lower-right corner and it’s a game where just a few hits are deadly, so paying attention to the subtitles at the same time as not dying isn’t easy. This wouldn’t be a concern for the part of the audience that can completely understand the Japanese dialogue, but that isn’t most players of the English version.
Verdict
MACROSS -Shooting Insight- has some great ideas and a nice mix of gameplay, but parts of it are very poorly implemented. It has tons of bonus content to unlock and more to do than many other shoot ’em ups, while simultaneously seeming to skimp in certain other areas. If you happen to be a Macross fan who is very good at the genre and doesn’t mind some iffy mechanics, this might be for you. Otherwise, it’s fun to play around with, see some of the unique ideas, and to experience the story, but that’s it.
WAIT FOR SALE ON MACROSS -SHOOTING INSIGHT-
If you are looking for another anime style shoot ’em up game, check out our review of DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou.
Many thanks go to Red Art Games for a PlayStation 5 review code for MACROSS -Shooting Insight-.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
