Akiragoya, a doujin developer now best known for Angel at Dusk, has been making unconventional but captivating shoot-em-ups for more than a decade. Steel Vampire, originally known as Metal Mosquito before it was localized into English with extra features, is not their most unusual work, but that doesn’t mean it’s without deeply inspired ideas. The story is barely present until the game’s end, but the premise is as ridiculous as you’d expect, involving a lone pilot with near-superhuman capabilities named Yoshino Sakurajima who has to save what little remains of humanity from blood-sucking machines.
Steel Vampire encourages aggression at all times. Your weapon gets significantly stronger as you get closer to enemies and you earn more points for doing so as well. However, your ship is massive for genre standards, so much so that squeezing past certain attacks can be outright impossible. This is all very much intentional; the best way to play Steel Vampire involves destroying everything before it even gets a chance to shoot and you have the firepower to do exactly that!
Your primary fire consists of a main cannon and two pods that follow along. You also have a secondary fire that’s more powerful, but slows you down during use and prevents enemies from dropping chips that can restore your health. Your bomb does big damage and absorbs bullets, allowing for quick boss kills and protection alike if you get overwhelmed. To start, you get three units of shield energy and can earn more by meeting score thresholds. Bombs work under the same system, so everything ties back into killing before you can be killed.
To keep you in check, a rank system exists to modify the enemy forces based on your performance. As you play, the rank increases and can be increased faster by picking up a specific item. If you use a bomb, get hit, or collect a different item, the rank can be lowered. Rank has a dramatic effect on enemy aggression and it’s visible at all times, so you’re encouraged to find a balance between raising it for more points/upgrades and lowering it so you don’t get killed and lose it all.
The only difficulty at first is called “Very Hard”, but more are unlocked once you do a 1CC and earn the true ending. In this initial mode, you can collect weapons that can then be equipped on subsequent runs. These weapons offer different projectile types as well as significant power boosts, making the 1CC far easier to obtain. On “Genocide Hard” difficulty, this system is replaced with the option to choose from five different ships, but for “Extra Genocide Hard” mode, you can continue to use and build up your arsenal over the course of six loops.
Steel Vampire is an intensely frenetic shoot-em-up, one that manages to defy genre conventions by finding ways to make unlikely ideas work naturally. It’s experimental and chaotic, but executed with great care and well worth playing regardless of your experience with the genre.
