'Paladin' available in Steam, Switch and Xbox One has resulted in my greatest shmup surprise of this 2019.
Picked up the Switch version, and man, this is the smarter and better designed take in the 'Defender' formula that I have played.
Basically, it's a 'Defender' clone infused with psychedelic and neonsish visuals, but played with a twin stick shooter control scheme.
The thing is that like in 'Defender', you need to defend buildings. Each building has a number of people. If an enemy UFO attacks a building, the number of people will decrease. And if a building is destroyed, it will activate a laser barrier complicating your movement through the scenario, because the barrier only will be deactivated every few seconds.
And here comes the masterful approach of the game. After destroying each enemy, you can collect a currency item that will only be available for a limited amount of time. So to obtain money, you need to play in a risky way, close to the ships, in the same way as in 'Graceful Explosion Machine'.
And after each wave out of 40 in the adventure mode, you will access a shop to buy upgrades with this currency.
There are two upgrades for the shoot of your ship, you can buy extra lives, you can buy bombs...
But you also need to manage the resources of the city, by buying things like a perk to increase the number of people in each building after each completed wave. And defenses for your buildings.
So at the end, you need to decide what to upgrade first, and be careful creating a balance between upgrading your fire power for the advanced waves, while you're sure that your buildings will resist the enemy attacks.
It has tons of additional game modes, and all of them have online leaderboards in this Switch version.
Each wave is masterfully designed with a fine tuned difficulty curve.
The game looks gorgeous in the Switch screen, running at 60 FPS with million of explosions, particles, enemies, bullets and whatnot.
They have nailed the feeling of the controls, it has A LOT of different ships each one intended for a style of play.
One of the finest western shmups in recent memory.
And this is the best part: it looks to an Atari / Jeff Minter / Eugene Jarvis / British tradition.
And there are not so many shmups released nowadays with such a great understanding of the principles of this Atari and neon infused tradition, playing all the right notes in such a brilliant way.