Horgihugh and Friends

I’m still not a fan of padding in my shmups, but I also can’t deny how satisfying it is to get everything memorized and nail a perfect run of a level after many attempts at doing so, growing more powerful with my attempts.

It's hard to recommend Horgihugh and Friends when I had such high expectations dashed. It's not a bad game per se, but it's full of annoying cheap deaths and the visual department doesn't hit where it needs to. It certainly isn't my "go-to" cute 'em up, but there is certainly is worse on the market. Sorry, Horgi - you're not the best boy.

Horgihugh and Friends isn’t going to set anyone’s world on fire – it’s not spectacular in any way. Despite some issues, though, it’s a solid shoot ’em up, and thanks to Eterday mode the more you put into it the more you get out. Ultimately, it’s the fact that it’s got cute animals as central characters that’s going to draw you to it, and that feelgood factor wins out. With its grim backstory, you’ll be rooting for Hugh and Figaro every step of the way.

Although Horgihugh And Friends leaves a shoddy first impression, it eventually becomes quite a good shmup after sticking with it. Unfortunately, soon after it starts getting good, you'll run out of things to see and do. It's still very cute, though!

Ah, retro-styled arcade shooters...

As someone that was curious about the first iteration of the game, I’m happy to have reviewed Horgihugh and Friends. It’s easily the definitive edition of the game, a charming and challenging Shmup that is well balanced and forgiving to newer players. While boss battles are the highlight, you’ll still have a lot of fun blasting your way through the Gozarean hordes—a game I can easily recommend to fans of the genre.

With its ambition to be more than just a port for the PC and iOS, lovable characters, music to get your groove on, and the 16bit graphics are all putting in their work to become an enjoyable game as a whole. It’s still a little unfortunate to notice some frame drops and technical issues where the bullets won’t fire, which made it seem worse than its original title. Even with some of the respectful staff working behind the scenes, the end result became more dishonorable than it should have been. We expect some updates to patch up some of the errors to be at least playable once it’s ready to meet the players.