So I just played Jamestown after having it sitting in my backlog for months, and boy, I'm unimpressed.
I really, really like bullet hell shooters. Especially the Touhou series, but I even have a blast with Gundemonium and most other stuff.
Jamestown however.. I don't know. My points:
The graphics. While I like the general style of it, I absolutely hate how they incorporated that style into the gameplay. When almost every opponent melts with the background, when you have no idea what actually IS an enemy and what's just animated background stuff, and when those stupid glowing, animated, golden, shiny, huge cogs you're supposed to collect are way more appearant than your enemy's bullets, then something's seriously not working for me. On higher difficulties, only 10% of my deaths are caused by me playing bad, but because I have no fucking idea what just hit me over all the stuff flying through. So while the graphics are georgeous in stills, I find them very, very distracting - to say the least - in terms of actual gameplay.
The music. I'd love the music if this would be some kind of Zelda-Clone, or an RPG. For a shooter, it just doesn't fit very well. There's no sence of urgency or drama in the music, it's just a 'nice' BGM that could probably fit every genre, well, except for freaking bullet-hell shooters. But yeah, this is probably just me.
The gameplay. You know, I'm not particulary great with shooters, but I like them. If you manage to get another wave of enemies, you feel like you accomplished something, and if you die, you get instant feedback on how you're playing. Both of these points simply don't work well with Jamestown.
The bullets appear to me to be totally random. With japanese shooters, even if things go insanely difficult, there's always this sense of beauty in those millions of bullets flying over your screen, like a carefully orchestrated laser show. You don't actually look on your ship or the bullets, but you see everything happening "down there" just from the corner of your eye. You can predict the bullets once they're on the screen, and you feel how close they are to you. Not in Jamestown. Everything feels random and not the slightest bit beautiful, hell, in most cases you can't even see a pattern, and if you can, it's pretty unimaginative. There is no reason to be proud of surviving stuff, because every time you are at the same point, things happen totally different. The thing is, there's something off even if there's a pattern that looks easy. I can't really put it in words here, but there's no flow to get into, if that makes any sense. It just doesn't feel right. And all that glowy, floating shit doesn't help :/
Also, there's something seriously wrong with the balancing of that huge laser beam thingy (that feels weak as fuck) and the standard shooting (that feels even weaker). I don't know, it just feels like the devs wanted to make up for the lacking forementioned "orchestrated" kind of difficulty by just making everything harder to destroy, even the tiniest little enemys.
Oh well, this has gotten far longer than I thought it would be. I really want to like this game, but I can't, and I feel kinda sorry. But yeah, maybe there are others with similar feelings about Jamestown.
tl;dr: I thought Jamestown would be awesome but for various reasons it's not - at least not for me.
