Years before Star Wars, video game designers had begun to explore galactic dogfighting. In 1962, Spacewar!, the first formal computer game, was a rudimentary but influential attempt: two narrow triangles swirled around the gravity well of a star, launching torpedoes at each other. Having established the medium’s first principles, hundreds of developers attempted to refine and perfect the genre, which rose and dived in fashion but never fully warped away. Cygni is, perhaps, the highest production attempt yet, a debut from a tiny Scottish studio that answers the improbable question: what if Steven Spielberg had directed Space Invaders?
A lone fighter, you streak across an alien planet attacking swirling flocks of UFOs and purplish space jellyfish as they pipette across the screen. Stylistically reminiscent of the polarity-swapping arcade classic Ikaruga, Cygni is a technological masterclass, your spaceship sweeping over distant robot battlefields, buffeted in the blast of a thousand fireworks. An orchestra, one moment frantic, the next melancholic, provides complementary backing to the action, which ebbs and flows with moments of respite between the flurries of activity.
Enemies either sweep through the air or skitter on the ground far below. You must switch between weapons to focus your attacks on either set of targets. Every few minutes you face a far larger foe, and must swish around its swipes and lunges while compensating the angle of your attacks. Enemies drop clusters of power-ups (lost, one by one, whenever you sustain damage) that can be diverted between your shield system or your weapons system, a somewhat fussy layer of complication that adds further strategy.
The game presents a formidable challenge, and most players should begin at the easiest difficulty level, where the laser bullets fall like a shower rather than hail, and you have a modest stock of lives that replenish between each of the game’s seven lingering stages. It is, at times, repetitious, and Cygni’s novel systems will no doubt prove divisive among the genre’s dedicated and often conservative followers. But for those who approach with an open mind and dextrous fingers, it remains a thrilling vision.