Every once in a while, you come across a game that does absolutely nothing new in terms of gameplay, visuals, ideas, and so on, but it’s so fun to play, you can’t be bothered about it. At the end of the day, “game feel” is the most important aspect of any piece of interactive software: if your game feels great to play, and is tons of fun, you can have the most generic idea in the world; I simply won’t care, and love my time with it anyway. I feel like this is the best way to start off this review, as this is exactly what I felt whilst playing Revolgear Zero.

Everything blows up in an overdramatic way. Gotta love it.

Initial impressions are clear: Revolgear Zero is clearly inspired by Gradius in its design, but instead of featuring a rotating set of powerups, you basically start off with a set list of them, based on which ship you decide to play as (this is its R-Type inspiration). You can then acquire new weapons and gear by spending money collected throughout your play sessions. What makes Revolgear Zero so much fun is the pure serotonine fountain that is acquiring such currency. In a style not unlike New Super Mario Bros. 2, you are showered with an absolutely insane amount of coins whenever you destroy an enemy. Considering how the screen is almost always plastered to the brim with foes, it basically means you are constantly being gifted coins through the usage of your overpowered weaponry.

Pour some coins on me.

I wouldn’t even call this a difficult bullet hell shooter, I don’t think it was even the developers’ intention. Everything is colorful, well-animated, and somewhat easy to defeat. Your weapons are really powerful; the game wants you to feel like an absolute beast when destroying bosses and enemy ships with attacks that nearly cover half of the screen’s real estate. In no moment did I feel like the game wanted to primarily test my pattern recognition or reflexes. Oddly enough, it just felt like the developers wanted to throw me into my own personal power trip. The decent presentation and ultra-motivating soundtrack were really helpful in this regard. I didn’t feel like I was a lone ship struggling to fight against powerful foes, I felt like a powerful one-man (or in this case, one-waifu) army.

The occasional boss battle to test your skills.

This is a simple review for a simple and straightforward game. Revolgear Zero is the quintessential example of game feel being the most important aspect of an interactive piece of software: it doesn’t innovate in terms of visuals, sound, or controls, but knows how to appease players with how powerful your weapons are, and with the sheer insane amount of rewards you acquire whenever you defeat hordes of enemy ships or a giant boss. I fell for its great atmosphere and arcadey feel. In a genre where innovation is hard to come by, Revolgear Zero didn’t even attempt to stand out with any kind of new features: it just tried to be tons of fun, and it succeeded.

Revolgear Zero is available now on PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB and Asus ROG Ally.

A copy of Revolgear Zero was provided by the publisher.