Raiden V: Director's Cut

Raiden V: Director’s Cut quietly lands on the Switch with little fanfare, and yet feels right at home along with all the numerous other bullet hell shmups currently available on the system.

Raiden V: Director's Cut brings the expanded version of this vertical shoot'em-up to the Nintendo Switch, with its mix of frantic action, local co-op mode and top notch soundtrack. Its minor flaws, such as an overwhelming amount of information, are easily drowned by the game's enveloping pace. Raiden V: Director's Cut is easily one of the finest shoot'em-ups available for the Nintendo Switch catalogue.

Raiden V: Director's Cut is a fine shooter. While it introduces some things to keep rookies engaged, it also has enough to keep veterans playing thanks to multiple routes and plane configurations. There's a limited selection of shooters for the bullet hell crowd to enjoy, and despite its issues with bullet visibility, Raiden V deserves a place in that library.

It had been a while since I last played a Raiden game and Raiden V: Director's Cut was pretty enjoyable after reacquainting myself with the series, my eyesight issues aside.  The fact you can beat the game on any difficulty can seem a tad off putting, but this is actually a good concept for newer players so they can experience the story then increase the difficulty when they start to improve so they can get a better ending.  That combined with the boss challenges give quite a bit of replayability  to the game and being able to take things a stage at a time makes it great to play in short bursts.  Overall a pretty good entry for the series.

Whether you are a serious fan of bullet hell games or new to the genre, Raiden V: Director's Cut is a great place to start. It offers easy to play, but hard to master gameplay and some great moments throughout and lives up to the series name!

Does not really bring anything new to the genre, but it does capitalize on what made the series popular in the first place, and that is just fine. The soundtrack being an added bonus on top of that.

Raiden V doesn't feature any crazy features or design choices that turn the shoot 'em up genre on its head, but it doesn't need to. Instead, it offers up an extremely polished shooter that sticks to the basics, while also having plenty of customizability due to a robust weapon system. There's enough missions and story branches to keep players busy for quite some time, and it's a great addition to any SHMUP fan's library.

It's a shame that lack of innovation and some strange design choices hinder it. However, it still remains an enjoyable experience for long-term fans of this almost three decade old franchise, or newcomers alike.

It will take you about a couple of hours to beat the main story, and after that it is up to you whether you want to hone your skills and try to beat the storyline on the S rank and to try and beat the boss stages. Overall, Raiden V is a welcome addition to the series, but it doesn't add much new to the table. It is fairly beginner friendly and can be enjoyed by the veterans alike, but generally, it lacks in additional content to make it stand out from other shoot-em-ups on the market.

Raiden V is just as good on PlayStation 4, though this rerelease doesn't quite add enough to justify picking the game up a second time.