GRAND CROSS: ReNOVATION review

Fans of weapon-shifting STGs like Radiant Silvergun or Ikaruga are urged to give GRAND CROSS: ReNOVATION a go. Learning to maximize the effectiveness of your mighty arsenal offers a lot of enjoyment.

Often, the best shooters make a stubborn first impression. Likely, that’s the case with the recent PC release of GRAND CROSS: ReNOVATION. After performing any desired key or control pad rebindings, resolution adjustments, or frame rate settings with the game’s launcher, you’ll probably delve into the game’s tutorial or prologue. Either way, both of these components instruct, but don’t quite prepare you for what lies ahead.

Like almost all of its vertically scrolling peers, your ship in equipped with a ‘normal’ shot. It’s bright blue firepower spreads into several smaller streams, but always fires upward. While it’s a modest gun, when you’re using the weapon, your health meter replenishes. Sure, GRAND CROSS: ReNOVATION only provides you with a single ship, but it revitalizes itself quickly, making your standard gun an indispensable foundation for your arsenal.

A Solar-Powered Slaughter

But the fun really begins when you fire your Sun Blade, which emits a powerful laser. Not only can it instantly burn through most enemies, but it cancels enemy projectiles. While ReNOVATION’s oppositional bullets don’t travel too quickly, they tend to gather in bullet hell-like clusters, making the Blade extremely advantageous. But here’s the downside: using the weapon depletes your life gauge. Use it for more than a few seconds and a single hit can instigate a ‘game over’.

Remarkably, the direction of the Sun Blade can be rotated around your craft, and there’s even an aiming line that’s persistently visible.  So, when a boss is firing with devastating energy blasts, you can position yourself outside the line of fire, retaliating with your own god-like power. Of if you are daring, you can hold both buttons down, releasing “Over Force” which adds lightning to the attack. It can be up to ten times more powerful, but the output will deplete your life meter much faster.

When Awkward Turns to Awesome

ReNOVATION has one more trick up its sleeve. Holding down the button for the normal shot along with a third button activates the Sun Blade Scatter, which flings off a swarm of bullets in all directions. It negates subordinate foes and their projectiles as well, which is advantageous when you want to clear out the space around you.

Much like your favorite tsundere, ReNOVATION makes a frosty first impression. Remember the first time you played Radiant Silvergun or Ikaruga and just couldn’t get the weapon cycling down? To a lesser extent, GRAND CROSS: ReNOVATION is like that. But after a few times tackling a boss in the game’s tutorial (which would be better described as “practice”), something will inevitably click in your mind. Once this occurs, you’ll begin to relish the game’s taut risk/reward mechanic.

Conclusion

Each of the game’s seven stages toss new novelties your way, from letting your dock with external armor to spinning the screen around for a disorienting moment. Sure, it’s a fleeting, twenty-minute trek through the game’s story mode. But ReNOVATION converges on sheer sensory overload much of the time. Filling the screen with a multitude of moving objects and bits of text-based storytelling, while Beatnoid Works’ (aka Fumhito Uekusa) synth-driven soundtracks melodiously wails away can be a lot to take in. I don’t know if I could have endured a longer campaign. And note that if you have photosensitivity, the flashing lights and shaking screen might be a bit too much.

If you are seeking additional contentment, ReNOVATION extends a boss rush mode as well as stage select component where you can vie for a place on the offline leaderboards. Or else, you can piece together the game’s plotline. After several playthroughs, I wasn’t quite sure of what was going on. But GRAND CROSS: ReNOVATION’s action is so wonderfully intense, that I’m having a great time getting to the bottom of things.

GRAND CROSS: ReNOVATION was played on PC
with review code provided by the publisher