Plagued by weird mismanagement via Harmony Gold, the IP has been a bit of a mess in North America with inconsistent releases that switch between Robotech and Macross off and on for decades between anime and games. Now, Macross is back with Macross -Shooting Insight- from Kaminari Games and publishers Bushiroad Inc. and Red Art Games. Macross –Shooting Insight- features all the iterations of the Macross series, so forget what you know about Robotech, it’s Macross time!
Macross -Shooting Insight- is a game of many faces. There are five main modes to the gameplay, Story Mode, Arcade Mode, Boss Rush, Ace Battles, and Area Survey. Let’s start with Story Mode since it’s the main mode you’re likely to try first. There’s a particularly thin story for Macross in story mode and it varies based on which pilot you choose to play. There are five different pilots, each from a different Macross iteration and with different weapons and stats. We chose to play through story mode with Hayate Immelmann, partly for his hair and partly for the rather transparent nod to the Immelmann turn, a tactical air combat maneuver originally conceived in WWI.
To put it plainly, the story for Macross -Shooting Insight- sucks no matter which pilot you play. There’s a weird space-time fold and all the different generations of Macross pilots end up in the same ship, fighting against a variety of foes from the series. It’s thin and poorly scripted and while the artwork is outstanding, you’ll have no idea what’s going on or who anyone really is unless you’re extremely familiar with the entire series. As a jumping on point, it’s an awful choice and it’s clear that the script is cobbled together just to create a pretense for showcasing the various different Macross Valkyries available.
Story mode also causes some problems with gameplay because each story segment plays out with glacially slow pacing in between shmup levels. This throws off your flow, making it hard to drop back into the game after every stage. On top of that, there are substantial story segments during gameplay itself and while they are translated into English text, the text is tiny and written at the bottom of the screen while you play through stages that are clearly not designed for you to be reading text. If you speak Japanese, you’re fine as everything is dubbed in Japanese (and quite well) but for English speakers, you might as well toss all that dialogue in the trash because you’ll never make it through a stage while reading the storyline, which is not great to begin with.
There’s no sense in further discussing the story other than to complain that space-time team-ups are way overdone, so let’s move on to the actual gameplay structure of Macross -Shooting Insight-. Levels consist of 3-4 different modes consistent with Macross Valkyries. If this is all new to you, in Macross, space/planetary Valkyries can transform into different modes. There’s standard Valkyrie mode where your ship looks like a traditional fighter jet, Gerwalk mode (Guardian for you Robotech peeps) in which the Valkyrie jet has arms and legs out for a mixed use approach, and Battroid (or Battloid) mode where your aircraft transforms into a giant mecha holding the gun which was previously attached to the fuselage in its arms as a huge rifle. Each form has different attack abilities and in Macross -Shooting Insight-, those are shown as different shmup styles. Valkyrie mode is presented as a vertical shmup with a horizontal screen, giving you a wide fighting area with not much top=down response time. Gerwalk mode shifts to horizontal shmup action, scrolling right, and Battroid mode allows you to play in a top-down 360 degree perspective, similar to Armada for the Dreamcast. There’s also a vertical twin stick Battroid mode in a few levels where you aim your shots with the right stick. Finally, there’s a third Battroid mode akin to Space Harrier where you’re abruptly flying forward in 3D dodging bullets coming directly at the screen, though this is only used a few times.
Whew. If you think that there’s a lot going on here, you’re not wrong, and we haven’t even looked at the mechanics in the 10 multi-part stages of the game yet! What you’ll quickly find about Macross -Shooting Insight- is that Kaminari Games tried to do a lot all at once and with constant shifts in perspective, the game feels like there’s no real consistency. At least, not aside from the overall stage design that is. Gameplay in each stage consists of fighting a large number of generic enemies with simplistic bullet patterns. Occasionally, slightly stronger enemies show up allowing you to charge your shots more effectively.
Your weapons systems are unique to each Valkyrie but unlike other games, you don’t collect power-ups. Instead you collect enemy drops to slowly charge and level up your weapons in power (but unfortunately not in firing patterns) from levels 1 to 5. As your weapons get stronger, it becomes easier to kill the popcorn enemies, but if you stop collecting drops, your weapons systems start to power down, dropping in strength as you proceed. While you’re using your main weapon, you can also dodge bullets with a barrel roll that moves your ship out of the direct line of fire. There’s no charge limit on dodging, but unfortunately, the invincibility from the move is negligible and the chances are high that if enemy fire is dense enough, you’ll end up dodging right into other enemy shots, dropping your health and just generally irritating you.
In addition to your main weapon there are two other weapons systems, including an awkward homing weapon, very similar to the wide field lock-on from Soukyugurentai (Terra Diver), for those of you familiar with that Saturn/ST-V classic. However, to activate lock on, you’ll have to stop firing your main weapon and use the right stick to target your lock-on. It only locks onto a few targets before maxing out too, and then you’ll have to release the lock to fire, allowing ample opportunity for enemy waves to drop a swath of missiles and lasers in your path. This lock-on also has a series of levels connected to your successful attacks that slowly rises, creating a score multiplier but with the limited value of lock-ons compared to your main weapon (at least depending on what ship you choose), it’s difficult to even bother with lock-on. If it didn’t require releasing primary fire, this firing option would have been a lot more useful but as it stands, it’s a novelty at best.
There are a couple of other key components to the combat design in Macross -Shooting Insight-. First of these is the Assist Attack. The bar in the bottom left of your screen essentially replaces bombs, instead leaving you with a slowly recharging full screen attack from the UN Spacey forces against your enemies. With the entire screen swept of enemies, you can quickly gather up all their drops and power up or clear a large barrage of laser fire in seconds, making your survival much more likely. While it charges up slowly, if you use it sparingly, Assist Attack is particularly useful after a few runs since you’ll know exactly where in the stage the heaviest fire density is. Finally are the songstress components. If you’re familiar with Macross or Robotech, music plays a key part in combat against the alien forces attacking. Take out enough jamming devices in each stage and your songstresses start broadcasting their songs, boosting your attacks, defense, and other functions temporarily. This also creates a sparkling visual overlay around the edges of the screen which is wildly distracting.
Speaking of visuals, Macross -Shooting Insight- struggles to present clear visuals. While the game is crisp and easy to see, the amount of background clutter is often high and quite distracting. Whether it be songs being played with sparkle visuals, scrolling backgrounds, or asteroids cluttering up the screen, as you progress through the game it becomes increasingly hard to see what’s going on, leading to hits that you realistically shouldn’t be taking. That’s a big deal in Macross, because in the default mode, there is very little health replenishment and none until you clear the stage. Your health bar stays the same even when you continue so as you take unnecessary hits, even with the generous hit box the game provides, you’ll quickly find that you run out of life and it’s game over. Continuing with a near-empty health bar is quite irritating as well.
Kaminari thought of this and included two different modes independent of difficulty that allow you to enable fast or slow health regeneration, but unfortunately, enabling it shuts down all access to the game’s leaderboards, forcing you to work for it if you want to compete against others. Even slow health regeneration also heavily unbalances gameplay design, shifting Macross -Shooting Insight- from a challenging game to a ridiculously easy one. Since there are no mid-bosses or larger challenging enemies throughout stages, it’s easy to build back health from a couple of hits by the end stage boss each time and then it’s simply a matter of keeping your shot strength up and maximizing your Assist Attacks to rapidly blow through the shockingly weak bosses at the end of each stage. While this is the only place you’ll see a semblance of modern bullet patterns, even those are lackluster on normal difficulty and rarely present much of a challenge. In short, normal mode is quite challenging with no health replenishment and a joke with it.
Moving on to other modes, there’s not a ton of innovation here. Arcade mode skips all the dialogue and plot but maintains all the in-stage cut scenes, still breaking up gameplay more than it should. Boss rush mode is fairly simplistic, but if you need to practice your strategy on bosses for scoring, it’s somewhat useful, especially since you can choose which boss you want to fight rather than having to run all the bosses in order. Area Survey is similar, allowing you to play through stages and practice them, nothing special here either. Ace Battles are the only really interesting thing in the other modes, allowing you to challenge characters from various Macross series and they’re a heck of a lot harder than anything the main game has to offer. But when the main game is so uninspired for both bullet patterns and enemy designs, there’s not a lot of temptation to spend hours bashing your controller against a few overpowered pilots, so this definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.
Even though the visuals are noticeably busy, that doesn’t mean they aren’t good. Stage visuals are quite nice even though they don’t complement the gameplay well and cut scenes where your Valkyrie transforms from mode to mode are particularly pretty, even if they slow down the perspective transitions and throw your groove off. Explosions are very cool and the missile patterns when things occasionally get a bit hectic are very reminiscent of classic Macross art design. Sadly, you can barely see enemies and there aren’t very many varieties through the whole game. Bosses are equally uninspired and barely have any shifts in design even though each has three different attacks depending on their life bar. Anime cut scenes are gorgeous and crisp of course and the songstress songs look cool as well, but what comes across more than anything is the uniformity of Macross -Shooting Insight-. Everything looks pretty much the same from stage to stage without significant variation in design, making the overall experience less engaging. That’s a shame because Macross has some amazing design work to draw from.
Sound is excellent overall in Macross -Shooting Insight- with high-quality Japanese voice work throughout the game. The songstress music is good of course, but the gameplay sound effects in-stage are lackluster at best, creating a very uneven experience in different portions of the game. The main soundtracks typically in some of the better shmups are noticeably missing here though, creating a lack of drama and connection in stages that also lack visual variety, further lessening player engagement. Just like the visuals, the sound design is inconsistent, making for a game that just doesn’t meet the expectations most fans will have for a Macross experience.
There are some nifty extras in Macross -Shooting Insight- that are good however. In addition to online leaderboards for the hardcore players, there is a gallery section to the game with several components. The first section showcases the different Valkyries in the game, interesting but nothing special unless your’re a fan. The Artwork section allows you to view an assortment of Macross artwork which you unlock during the course of play along with a few cinema sequences. The Macross Memories and Akashic Collection are additional unlocks of screenshots and items from various Macross iterations and again, will likely only appeal to fans. As an added bonus, the Macross Memories are ridiculously silly to unlock, requiring you to spend far too much time in Ace Battles for anyone who isn’t a completist or an obsessive Macross fan. Your saved replays are also stored in this area if you’re the type of player who likes to analyze their performance. Yes, the gallery is a weird place for that to access that but at least it’s an option.
Overall, Macross -Shooting Insight- is an experience that feels like the developers simply tried to do to much rather than doing one or two things well. With no option to manually convert your Valkyrie from mode to mode, pacing and story issues, limited enemies and bullet patterns, and floaty physics that lead to more hits than you should realistically take, the overall game just isn’t that engaging and fun. That’s a shame because the Macross IP is fantastic and seeing it underutilized is frustrating. For extremely hardcore Macross fans, this might be an acceptable game if it ends up on discount, but at $40 for the digital and $50 for the digital, the game simply doesn’t justify the price.
This review is based on a digital copy of Macross -Shooting Insight- provided by the publisher. It was played on a PS5 using a 55” 1080p Sony TV. Macross -Shooting Insight- is also available for Switch, PS4, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.