Dream Trigger 3D preview: Bullet hello
D3 Publisher's 3DS launch window title, Dream Trigger 3D, takes the basics of bullet-hell shooters and scrambles them into something unexpected and even more difficult. Well, perhaps I should say it takes a basic of bullet-hell shooters: bullets all over the damn place. The rest is pretty much all new, and crazy.
How crazy? Dream Trigger is a shooter in which you can't see the enemy ships, and in which you fire into the screen.
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Dream Trigger makes use of two mechanics that separate it from, well, anything. Before you can really see, and fire upon, the enemies that dance onto the screen in Galaga-esque formations, you have to find them with your sonar. This is done by dragging along the touch screen, at which point a blip will ping out along the path of your finger and reveal any enemies it touches on the top screen. The enemies are always visible on the bottom screen, so it's not as much of a game of Battleship as it sounds. Also, the enemy ships in Battleship don't spray bullets out in all directions, constantly -- which every enemy in this game does.
The second core mechanic is the fact that your shots don't actually radiate outward toward the enemies. Instead, when you hold the fire button, you shoot directly into the screen, toward the enemies. At least, that's the visual effect. Functionally, it just means you have to get right on top of an enemy with your gun firing in order to make contact.
This would be suicide if holding the fire button didn't also put a shield around your own vessel while active -- until your gun runs out of energy (replenished when sonar pings an enemy ship). Actually, it's kind of suicide anyway. There's a lot of finesse involved in timing your sweeps so that enemies are made vulnerable by the sonar just as you fly by and zap a bunch of them, then retreat to relative safety.
"Finesse" is code in this case for "skill I didn't pick up in my demo session." I'm pretty sure I didn't clear a single level, in fact. Dream Trigger 3D is quite difficult. At least until you get used to it, all those interacting mechanics make it a lot harder to intuit than traditional shooters, even if the actual bullet patterns and enemy waves aren't as intense. To be honest, I didn't know what to expect from Dream Trigger before playing it -- I kind of thought it would be a me-too shmup. But while I don't know how much fun it'll be in the long term (not much at all if I'm never able to complete a level!), I can confidently describe it as unique.
