Deathsmiles

All of the game's stages are open from the beginning, and you are free to choose the order in which you tackle them. As it can take more than a single stage to collect the required 1000 gems for Power Up mode, strategy is to be found in selecting the order of levels (and their respective difficulty level) in order that you reach Power Up state in the optimum location.

The combination of all these factors makes the spread of potential high scores gigantic, and much of the game's long-term appeal is in refining a meta-strategy in order to squeeze as many points as possible from your route. Of course, if you choose to use a continue your score is reset to zero, so the only way to play the game properly is to use a single credit, and forge your way a little further with each attempt.

Visually, Deathsmiles has the look of a Sega Saturn title, with slight waxy character sprites overlaid on jagged backgrounds. But the option to stretch the screen dimensions to fit widescreen TVs is welcome; the benefit of being able to see the action more clearly outweighs the reduction of resolution as you zoom in. The loli-goth styling is born of Japanese cliché, but the theme does give rise to some fantastic enemy designs, especially with regard to the boss characters, such as Whroom, a giant sorcerer tree who bookends the forest stage.

For Cave enthusiasts, this is a comprehensive package, offering no less than six versions of the game from the original arcade board version through to the Mega Black Label – a version previously only playable at special Cave events in Japan, which introduces a fifth playable character and a new playable area.

Perhaps of most interest is Version 1.1, in which you are also given control of your character's familiar, an R-Type orb-like creature that follows you around on screen firing its own stream of bullets. The differences between the modes are subtle, and most will be happy to focus their attention on the Xbox 360 area of the game. But Cave is to be applauded for sheer comprehensiveness.

For the US release of the game, some slowdown was removed, much to the chagrin of die-hard fans who were now unable to compare scores attained on the Xbox 360 version with those attained on the arcade boards. This has supposedly been put back for this release, meaning that the European version of Deathsmiles is the most faithful to the original available.

As with the American version of the game, Europeans have been given their own set of leaderboards to plug into, so there's no competition to be had with Japan or the US' best players. Publisher Rising Star says this is to provide a fair start to European players, but for our top players the lack of global competition will no doubt be a disappointment.

Regardless, this is a superb horizontal shoot 'em up delivered in a sterling package. It has all of the score-attack appeal of Bulletstorm in a far more dense and concentrated form. Those able to see past the idiosyncratic, somewhat stale visuals to perceive the zeros and ones ticking away beneath the surface will discover one of Cave's finest achievements: a game that lowers the barrier to accessibility without compromising its ultimate depth, a new Defender of the shoot-'em-up faithful.