izigame.me

As a big fan of Sega and rail shooters, I had high hopes for Air Twister. After all, Yu Suzuki, titan of the legendary AM2 team, absolutely carried the Saturn and Dreamcast, so certainly an indie passion project from this man has to be good, right? Unfortunately Air Twister does not live up to the pedigree of its creator.
For starters, it doesn't play quite right. The main shot is far too slow, both in its rate of fire and projectile speed, and those infirmities paired with the lack of a reticle make it borderline useless. A Panzer Dragoon style lock-on shot is also present, and that generally works well except that it starts with a max lock-on of four enemies, and can't damage stronger enemies much because it can only lock onto them one time (unless they are a boss with multiple points). It feels somewhat better once upgraded to higher target counts, but games like Rez and Panzer Dragoon that are many decades old play much smoother. The blueprint has been there for a long time. It was simply ignored.
Many enemy attacks are also difficult to dodge, not for lack of reflexes, but rather because it's visually unclear where they will land. After a game or two of learning, they become trivially easy, but the fact that dodging on sight alone sometimes does not work well indicates a tremendous lack of polish. The bosses are unimpressive and often die much faster than expected.
The art and sound design are disastrous. The lack of cohesiveness is immersion-breaking. One wave of enemies will be giant flying insects, the next a group of silver geometric shapes, followed by flying jellyfish, then hop on a giant goose and fight a boss. Basically, many enemies get thrown into stage aesthetics they don't fit with because the low number of enemies means they needed to be reused. The supposed artistic goal was to "resemble that of Alice down the rabbit hole," but the stage pacing achieves the opposite. You start in an ocean level, then move to a desert level, then much later in the game play more ocean and desert levels visually similar to the beginning. There is no progressive culmination of increasingly fantastic levels. And the soundtrack is in one word...unfortunate. On the whole, I could be more easily convinced that this game was a school project than a game designed by Yu Suzuki.
It's certainly not all bad. Although the environments generally lack detail, the graphics, are bright, smooth, and colorful. It's not a lazy effort in terms of game length, and has a decent amount of extras and additional modes. I could even go as far as to recommend it (but only on a significant sale) if you love rail shooters because the genre is dead and new games are few and far between. But don't be fooled by the positive reviews from zoomers who are too young to have played real rail shooters. If games like Rez and Panzer Dragoon Orta are 10/10s, this is a 5.5/10.