Barrage is a 2D Action game that takes place in 2048, a fateful year that sees Earth invaded by an alien mothership. It kicks off with a cut-scene showcasing the Earth Defense Force attempting to halt the invasion, but being quickly overwhelmed by the alien’s sheer numbers. Humanity is both outmatched and outgunned at every turn. In this increasingly grim situation, we play as a blonde-haired mute female, only known as Captain. She alongside her second in command, Hermes, have their transport helicopters ambushed and causes the one Hermes was riding in to crashland. This is where our journey starts as Captain commands them to land in this hostile-filled forest unwilling to leave someone behind.
One of the first things you’ll notice as you get used to the controls and move around is a soldier following you around. If the title Barrage and the opening intro didn’t tip you off by now, we will be up against a staggering amount of foes at any one time. Every extra gun by your side can be the difference between being able to hold off their forces or be overwhelmed. Your character is no push-over. She can carry any two guns at a time, and has access to an arsenal of 16 weapons to get her hands on across the game. You can jump around and outmaneuver the enemy forces by your lonesome, yet once it comes time to reload your weapon, that is when you’ll be wishing you weren’t fighting a war by yourself. Reloading has you completely stationary and will have you unable to cancel the animation, despite possibly getting shot in the face. Barrage does a rather good job at making you want to help out stranded soldiers and trying to keep them alive.
Captain also contains a unique ability. Crouching will raise up an energy shield around herself and be able to absorb up to 60 points of damage from every attack. Attacks by weaker enemies will have no effect on her in this state, making this a very handy way to keep the men behind you alive while they fire from behind. This shield does not make you invulnerable, however, if you see a tank rolling up it is best to hightail it out of there. That’s one way to play it, but you can also use your allies as cannon fodder during a fight if you wish, as you hang back in relative safety. Each of the nine main missions varies things up quite a bit to differentiate themselves. From the first to the last, one thing will remain a constant. You will have to fight tooth and nail for every inch of land you regain from the alien menace. With how many characters and enemies this game has on-screen at any one time, things will quickly get chaotic and the only time you’ll want to stop shooting is to reload as both sides battle it out.
I was impressed by the sheer scale of things. The pictures on the store page of this game were unassuming to how most of the experience actually is. Things will rarely be calm. It only escalates further as the unorganized fighting eventually turns into large scale offensives involving helicopters, mechs, tanks, and infantry. Quite the departure from fighting in the jungles to save a friend, and that isn’t even an end-game level. On the topic of levels, after each one, we will be taken to a hub-world of sorts. In here we’ll be able to select new missions, replay already completed ones, and stock up on unlocked weapons. There is a difficulty selection option in here as well. It is not obvious at all. They are just floating E, H, I, letters in the middle of the room that you may not even see if you didn’t explore beforehand. Those stand for Easy, Hard, and Inferno. Just jump into the letter with the difficulty that you want in order to set it.
Choosing to play on Hard will unlock some of the H content in the Gallery mode, while completing it on Inferno unlocks all of it. You can still unlock most of it on Easy via gameplay itself, though that may take longer with all there is to see. The most common type of lewd content you’ll be seeing is the female soldiers being sexually abused by their alien captors. There is no penalty for just sitting back and watching it happen as the sex animation repeats, though it would be wise to eventually save them. This is where your source of new recruits under your command comes from, and is a reward of sorts for thoroughly exploring an area. With how long some missions can be, it can be a real gamble as to whether you should go off the beaten path to explore with your probably battered and exhausted squad. It can also be your saving grace gaining a fresh, new soldier to tag along and help you pull through.
The other form of hentai occurs when you are low on health and get into melee range with an enemy. That will see your character be the one abused, though it doesn’t actually cause any damage to you. It can even be useful, in fact, as you are invulnerable while the animation plays out and can use that to survive a barrage of incoming projectiles before they hit you. Just mash the attack button to escape whenever you please. It is far from a get out of jail card, however. If you are that low on health to begin with, the possibility of success is still slim with how hard the enemies can strike in later levels. The lewd content is there and plentiful if you let it, yet it is hardly the focus of the game. You really need to work for your hentai here, more so if you want to see everything only accessible by beating Barrage in the Inferno difficulty. Whether that is a good thing or not will depend on personal tastes.
Surprisingly enough, Barrage has a large focus on story. There is a decent amount of dialogue throughout to flesh out the world and the events occurring. They have two rather serious problems, though. You will find that English translation is far from what can be called great. It is barely understandable at times, and to make matters worse, the dialogue boxes disappear rapidly as conversations happen. If you are not a fast reader and capable of making sense of poorly worded sentences on the fly, you will have quite some trouble following the narrative. That’s a shame too. It is not a plot that will stay in your memory for years to come, but is entertaining and has some unexpected twists where the aliens aren’t the only things to worry about. Allowing the players to read at their own pace would have made the translation much less frustrating.
Another flaw this title has is that only the starting pistol has a sound effect. Shooting any other gun results in nothing but silence. The same thing with any explosions, those are silent as well. As you can imagine, that makes destroying an enemy tank with an RPG spectacularly anti-climatic. Visually, the weapon impacts and explosions look nice, but the lack of any sound whatsoever aside from the music is disappointing. The H content animation is well done at least, with over 30 of them to see. It lacks in the sound department, though when it comes to content, Barrage has a good amount. After you make your way through the nine levels, there are 6 extra missions. They aren’t connected to the main story, yet remain just as creative and contain exclusive content you haven’t seen, such as new enemies. The less creative ones have you holding out against a horde of 1200 zombies, while others are basically loving recreations of the Earth Defense Force series. All are pretty fun and well worth playing after you’ve gone through the story.
Controllers are supported, but unlike the keyboard, the buttons can not be changed. It features an unusual control scheme that will take a bit to get used to if you go that route. Something that I’ve failed to mention as of yet are your items. Alongside your two weapons, you can carry one extra piece of equipment. They can range from a barricade to hide behind that also allows you to shoot through it, to a flying turret to help you lay down more firepower until it runs out of ammo. Another interesting feature on paper is that you can only shoot diagonally. No shooting up or down. Some enemies are specially made to be shorter than the arc you can fire, but the problem here is that your melee attack can only be used with the pistol. If you swap that out, then either you hope that your weapon has an inaccurate enough spread to kill it with its stray bullets as you shoot over it, or hope that your ally’s stray projectiles hit it. This is more of a problem when they are in a group, and for salt in the wound, there is a foe that summons an infinite amount of short enemies until you kill it.
As cheap as that is, it is not all too deadly as they don’t cause much damage. Where the lack of diagonal shooting really causes harm to the game is in Mission 6 that has you fight the mother-ship. They give you a choice of a tank or mech to fight mostly air-based threats. All you can really do is inch forward to take the shots that would hit your allies as they do all the work. The ground-based enemies are really rare, so you are mostly left to wait until the AI finishes up and slowly move again to face the next batch of foes as to not get overwhelmed. And at the end of it you face a boss that suffers from the game rarely, but noticeably making an enemy be far too bullet spongey to feel like a satisfying fight. I enjoyed the rest of the missions, including the extras, but level 6 is one experience I never want to touch again.
Overall, Barrage remains a surprisingly feature-packed Action game that should be right up the alley of any EDF fan or just someone that enjoys facing off in large scale battles. It is not satisfied with just sticking to that formula, you’ll find that it is all too eager to venture into new ideas on a per mission basis to keep things fresh. With all these ideas and features thrown in, most of them do indeed stick. This is an ambitious title no doubt. For the price of seven and a half dollars, you are getting a rather large amount and this helps to excuse some of its flaws, such as the lack of near any sound effects. Barrage is not the type of experience that I would classify as a must-play, but it is serviceable enough, and a fun action-filled romp that shows hentai games are more than just fap material. It’s basically an EDF demake of sorts with futanari cyclop catgirls. What’s not to love?
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