In recent years, many video game franchises have hit the board gaming scene with adaptations of their original game, with successful Kickstarters like Slay the Spire and Dead Cells. Those are incredible games in their own right, but what I’d like to touch upon is not capturing a single game, but rather capturing the feeling of playing a whole genre of games. Bullet from Level 99 Games does just that.
Bullet is an original fast-paced puzzle action game meant to capture the feeling of playing a shoot-em up or “bullet hell” game, and it more than delivers in its gameplay. The aim of Bullet isn’t really to defeat your opponents directly, but rather to survive as long as possible and outlive them. Standing in your way of this are the titular bullets which threaten to hit your character and knock them out of the running.
Each bullet has a color which corresponds to one of the five columns in your “sight,” essentially your main player board, and a number to dictate how far the bullet travels down it—once a bullet reaches the bottom, your character is hit for damage. Bullets skip any bullets already in the column as they travel, so as the bullets pile up on the board you’re at a greater risk of being hit. Couple this with the fact that you’ll be placing more and more bullets on your board as time goes on, you’re truly placed in a “bullet hell” as you scramble to address this onslaught of cardboard circles.
There are a few ways to combat these bullets, which is where the “puzzle” portion of the game comes in. Each character has a deck of patterns at their disposal that, when their requirements are met, allow you to use them to clear bullets. The same goes for actions, which you can spend action points on to usually move bullets to better complete patterns or draw completely new patterns.
Yet in Bullet, no two characters play the same, and are wholly unique experiences from each other. Each of them have different patterns with different requirements, or actions unique to them. They also have special abilities that change how the mechanics of the game work for them with a wide range of complexity demarcated by the heart or star in the top right of their character boards. This can be as simple as Esfir Volkova’s hand size of four instead of three, or as complex as Senka Kasun’s crosshair markers she needs for her patterns. This gives Bullet a deep well of depth and replayability as players try how each character works, and almost like a fighting game find characters they are best at or “main.”
Where Bullet really captures that fast pace of shmup games like Touhou is in how turns work. Gone are the regular conventions of waiting for a player to take their turn to take your own. They are instead replaced with a round system with a time limit. Each player plays simultaneously and has three minutes to place bullets, use patterns, and use actions before the timer runs out—and when it does, any player with bullets left to place can only place down bullets and pray. Level 99 Games has even made original music for the game to play during these rounds that are perfectly timed to three minutes, with reminders at every minute to let the players know how much time they have left. As the rounds go on and get even harder, there’s little time to think, forcing the player to make their decisions quickly and take action as if they’re actually experiencing the fun stress of a shmup.
Furthermore, while I personally haven’t delved as deeply into it, Bullet has a co-op boss mode that is also very much in line with its shmup inspiration. Every single character has a reversed “boss” side that a group of players can go up against and try to beat. With such a wealth of characters in Bullet, this mode has just as much replayability as its normal mode.
I give Bullet♥︎ and Bullet★ Two Thumbs Up. You truly can’t go wrong with a purchase of either base game, but I’ve found that the characters in Bullet♥︎ are often easier to digest for newer players. The Bullet series of games has quickly become one of my favorite board games. Even though it may seem daunting at first for new players, the game is actually quite easy to understand and get the hang of once you start playing—and since rounds are on a timer, full games are quite short, allowing for players to try their hand at multiple different characters in an afternoon or evening of gaming. If you get hooked on the base game and want more Bullet, there are multiple expansions that add all sorts of fun characters into the mix, and with both base games you can play with up to eight players in a single game for an even more chaotic experience.
Verdict: 👍👍
