The other day, I talked a bit about shoot ’em up Cardinal Sins. Today, I’ve been spending some time with its follow-up (or, more accurately, the follow-up to Judgement Silversword) Eschatos.

Eschatos is very obviously cut from the same cloth as its predecessors, since it plays almost identically. Its main difference is the fact that it’s a considerably more technically advanced game, boasting dynamic camera angles, full 3D polygonal graphics and all manner of other goodies. It’s not the most stunning game you’ll ever see, but it looks good for a game of this type, and it runs gloriously smoothly, which is of vital importance to the genre.

(At least, the original Xbox 360 version of Eschatos runs gloriously smoothly; at the time of writing the newly translated PC version has some framerate issues on nVidia cards, but the devs are working on resolving this.)

Eschatos is a shoot ’em up that understands that shoot ’em ups should be thrilling theme park rides: exciting and surprising at first, predictable after a few goes. That “predictable” part is important: the essence of getting good at a game of this type is learning what the game is going to throw at you and then dealing with it accordingly, which is something you can only do with practice.

Eschatos makes the learning process quite straightforward by splitting each of its stages into areas, and each of its areas into waves. In order to get the best scores, you need to completely clear waves in succession (which increases your score multiplier) as quickly as possible (which nets you a time bonus, multiplied by your multiplier). Even boss encounters are broken down in this way, making it relatively straightforward to learn what to expect, with the challenge then coming from correctly and consistently dealing with it.

It’s particularly nice to note that the scoring system is easy to understand and parse, even on the game’s “Advanced” mode; having largely come to modern shoot ’em ups through Cave games, which tend to have some of the most complicated scoring mechanics known to man, this is a very pleasant surprise indeed, because it makes it easy to understand how to get better at the game: destroy more stuff more quickly, simple as that. (This is where someone chimes in and points out it’s actually much more complicated than that, naturally…)

I’m a fan. I must confess the 360 version had been on my shelf for a while unplayed, but the event release of the Steam version (and the realisation it could do with a patch) inspired me to dig it out again. I’m once again reminded that Japanese devs really are the masters of their craft… and, apparently, of glorious FM synthesis music that sounds like it’s straight out of a Mega Drive game.

Time to go chase some high scores!