First impressions, MACROSS – Shooting Insight – is multiple shoot-em-up game that caters mostly to the fanbase of the popular anime series. The game has an original story that has characters from five MACROSS series: MACROSS Plus, MACROSS 7, MACROSS Zero, MACROSS Frontier & MACROSS Delta. Those who grew up with the original 1980s series of watching Super Dimension Fortress Macross (aka Robotech: The Macross Saga) will be let down that this set of cast isn’t in this game.
Shoot in Various Ways
Shooting Insight isn’t just a top-down, vertically-shooting game like Raiden or 1942. Instead, the game also offers horizontal shooting, corridor-style shooting and 360-degree scrolling shooting. The game changes it up in-between areas to give some diversity, making it an enjoyable ride for the most part. While the corridor-style shooting looks cool at first, its depth-of-field perspective shooting feels off. Flying across one side of the screen to the other feels a bit slow too. At least you can dodge incoming attacks, but only once per few seconds.
Additionally, the game tends to jam in a story scene in every level, deflating the pacing. Sure you can skip it but players would rather see their fighter floating with dialogue in the background than cut to a scene of illustrated characters talking like a visual graphic novel.
Diva songs, those who remember watching the MACROSS series will be glad to see this played into while playing. However it does become a bit distracted with the glowing, colorful frame wrapped around the screen. Be sure to stay alert when enemy projectiles and enemies themselves come from behind this short-timed event.
A Fighter’s Handicap
One of the benefits in the game is the game options to cater anyone from newbie to expert. For example, changing the difficulty and turning on regeneration automatically when hit. Players can finish one of the game’s story modes in less than an hour when set to the easiest difficulty.
Once you complete one story mode out of the five, additional options like Arcade mode become available. It’s a bummer you have to play through the game to get some of these options.
The Final Shot
First impressions, MACROSS – Shooting Insight – does have some fun factor, especially fans of the series. However, it’s not a long journey with how much content there is and the drawback of some gameplay mechanics.
A PlayStation 5 review code provided for this article.