Cygni: All Guns Blazing review – a thrilling new space frontier

(KeelWorks; Konami; PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox)
The Scottish studio’s debut game is a fiendishly innovative take on the classic space battle genre

Years before Star Wars, video game designers had begun to explore galactic dogfighting. In 1962, Spacewar!, the first formal computer game, was a rudimentary but influential attempt: two narrow triangles swirled around the gravity well of a star, launching torpedoes at each other. Having established the medium’s first principles, hundreds of developers attempted to refine and perfect the genre, which rose and dived in fashion but never fully warped away. Cygni is, perhaps, the highest production attempt yet, a debut from a tiny Scottish studio that answers the improbable question: what if Steven Spielberg had directed Space Invaders?

A lone fighter, you streak across an alien planet attacking swirling flocks of UFOs and purplish space jellyfish as they pipette across the screen. Stylistically reminiscent of the polarity-swapping arcade classic Ikaruga, Cygni is a technological masterclass, your spaceship sweeping over distant robot battlefields, buffeted in the blast of a thousand fireworks. An orchestra, one moment frantic, the next melancholic, provides complementary backing to the action, which ebbs and flows with moments of respite between the flurries of activity.