Now I don’t consider myself an amazing video game player: I always needed to stock up on elixirs in Ninja Gaiden, I achieve an immense amount of deaths when I play Halo 3 multiplayer, hell; I had an incredibly hard time when I went back to play some of the old 2D Sonic games. But I also don’t consider myself a bad gamer. I’ve beaten Rock Band and Guitar Hero on expert, the Halos on legendary, and can straight up rape TMNT 1989 on XBLA.

But Triggerheart Exelica is just an entirely different story. With the release of Omega Five, I became interested in the shmup genre. Omega Five was a brilliant shooter with great presentation. After the first ten minutes of playing it, I would have said it was one of the hardest games I’ve ever played. In retrospect, it actually has a fair difficulty level and strikes a great balance between challenge and fun. But this is all without the context of Triggerheart Exelica.

So let’s try using the context. This is fairly hard, however, because Triggerheart Exelica is a fairly difficult game. And when I say fairly difficult I mean fucking ridiculous. I guess an example relating video games would be the best place to start. Omega Five is like playing some Barbie video game with some really smart eight-year-old girl who’s really into Barbie, but also really good at puzzles, or good at whatever you do in Barbie games, while Triggerheart Exelica is like playing Ninja Gaiden on Master Ninja while only using your penis to control it. But that doesn’t really capture the difference. Omega Five is like having sex with Natalie Portman while your face is covered in Scarlett Johannson’s breasts and the bed is a big pile of money, and Triggerheart Exelica is like being screwed by Michael Clarke Duncan after having just poured Tabasco sauce all over his penis. And you’re wearing one of the death traps from Saw.

Such extreme depictions are baseless if nothing is explained about the game however. Triggerheart Exelica is your traditional bullet-hell shmup. There are two characters that you can play as, the only difference between them being that one shoots concentrated, linear bullets and the other shoots spread out, thin bullets. Both of them are quite useless. The defining feature of the game is the anchor mechanic. Now, I didn’t understand this mechanic until I actually played the game, namely because nobody can describe it well but since this feature is the only thing that makes the game different from other shooters, I’ll try to explain it a little better. Your ship in the game contains an anchor that you can launch with the press of a button. Launching this anchor at an enemy will hook onto the enemy and kill it. But while the anchor button is still pressed down, the enemy will continue to swing around your ship blocking enemy bullets. After a few seconds (or letting go of the anchor button), the enemy will be launched outwards. If it hits other enemies on its trajectory outwards, it will kill them as well. On large enemies such as bosses, the anchor cannot be used to kill or swing but instead is used to concentrate the fire on the enemy.

This anchor mechanic would make a lot of bullet hell shooters much easier. And it definitely makes Triggerheart Exelica easier, to the extent that having an old hammer makes fighting a zombie horde easier. I know that something described as “bullet-hell” isn’t exactly supposed to be easy, but they’re generally designed to test reflexes, pattern recognition, and patience. Well, these are all tested in the first level of Triggerheart Exelica but after that, it only tests your WTF-meter. The enemies don’t shoot in patterns, but instead create walls of bullets that are literally impossible to navigate through. The only way to get by this part is by using the anchor mechanic, which isn’t really all that intuitive.

But perhaps I’m being a little extreme and unfair. This version of the game does feature infinite continues, so technically the only “hard” part is getting the achievements. In that sense, it’s very similar to the XBLA version of Smash TV (whose review would downright mimic this one’s), and I also have to admit that difficulty also stems from my ignorance of shmups. I’m certain there are shooters exponentially harder than Triggerheart, and that countless players have 1cc’d this game with their eyes closed or something. As I play this game more and more, I’ll probably get used to the anchor and understand the mechanics of the game better. Hopefully I’ll be able to look back and say the same thing about this game as I had to say about Omega Five.

At 800 MS points, I would advise everyone to pick this up, though with a bit more hesitation than Omega Five. The graphics and art style are all passable, but can sometimes cause problems with seeing everything on screen. And the lack of any online modes, just like with Omega Five, really do hurt the game. This shooter is blander and more difficult, but also possesses a certain traditional charm to it. I think it’s a must-have for anyone into shooters, or anyone that wants to be prepared for when Ikaruga hits, but once again, the best reason to buy it is to support the genre.