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ZeroRanger is a shmup developed by two members of the shmup community and has been in development for like 10 years. It has been polished quite a lot as a result and it's one of the best executed love letters to shmups I've ever seen. The stage design is really tight, very varied and there is a ton of stuff to do in them. It's also pretty unique in how it handles story and narrative in a shmup. It's also like one of the only shmups where you don't want to get spoiled on the story. The mode I'm playing here is more stream-lined for doing score runs, so most of the story is skipped in this.

The game has a wide array of different weapons and powers. You get new ones after every stage and you can choose between two that are vastly different from each other. These weapons are also completely different if you're playing as the other ship. Despite that, all the weapons in the game are pretty well balanced, though I feel like Type B's lock-on is way superior to C's lock-on or the charge shot in general.

The game does not have bombs, but you do get a lot of lives. You get lives through score and you can hold a total of eight at a time. There are also secret extends and a bunch of fixed extend drops.

The game does have rank. Rank seems to mostly influence how much the popcorn enemies shoot at you. A thing to keep in mind is that stage select always starts you at zero rank and you can't set the rank, which makes practicing the game kinda annoying.

Scoring in this game is mostly chaining, overkills, and secrets.
Chaining is basically Dodonpachi chaining but duo to all the different kinds of weapons, you have way more options to keep the chain going. Max chain multiplier is x6,4, but in melee form you can extend that to a max of x12,8. How fast the chain timer drops is depended on your multiplier. It's pretty lenient at x6,4, but drops really fast at x12,8. At x12,8 it drops basically just as fast as in Dodonpachi's 1st loop. The chain doesn't instantly reset back to x1,0 if you break it though, it starts to rapidly count down.
Overkills happen when you keep damaging an enemy that is already destroyed and is exploding. Doing this gives you the enemy value twice. Shooting an exploding enemy doesn't give you chain meter like shooting an enemy though, so you have to be careful.
For secrets, most stages have three secret point items that appear after you fulfill certain conditions. There are also all sorts of other subtle secrets you can do for extra score.

The game has like a million references to all kinds of different shmups. Can you spot them all?

Probably the only things I don't like about this game are the extremely poor practice options and how close the popcorn can randomly pointblank you. The practice thing is especially bad in 1-4, the part you actually want to practice is 5 minutes into the stage. Regarding the latter, when popcorn fire at you is basically random and the sealing distance is very, very short, so it's really easy to get randomly pointblanked and it's quite frustrating.

This was like the most requested game ever, wow.

Buy the game on Steam here:
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