There is a reason that most shoot ‘em ups don’t come with a story – they simply don’t need one. It is usually the standard one lone pilot against the horde, and anything that isn’t you is an enemy and needs to be destroyed. Simples, as a certain meerkat is known to say.
But what happens when you try to introduce a story to a basic shoot ‘em up? Well, the brave folks over at Stamina Zero have decided to find out, and in Cilla, we are tasked with not only saving the world, but having a look at a narrative as well. Does this work?
I guess we should start at the beginning, focusing on this story that the developers have insisted on shoehorning into a shoot ‘em up. We are Cilla, a super soldier made, designed and created with only one goal in mind – to fight. Yes, we are the perfect soldier, and so when an alien invasion threatens the Earth, who better to send up to take on the baddies. Of course, no one asks a perfect soldier what they think about going to fight, do they?
Well, what if the perfect soldier turns out not to be so perfect after all? As we progress through the story, there are lengthy cutscenes that explore Cilla’s angst in great detail, and honestly, it’s just one big cliche after another. ”How can I murder?” Cilla wonders, before mowing down an entire squadron of enemies. There seems to be a moralistic tale trying its best to be heard here, but it is drowned out by the gunfire of the ship we fly. Maybe there is a reason why shoot ‘em ups don’t tend to be big on narrative arcs…
The story is a wash, to be brutally honest, so let’s have a look at the rest of the game. Sadly, the gameplay is no better than that narrative, being simplistic in the extreme. It is perfectly possible to fly down the centre of each level, barely having to fire, in order to complete the section we are on. There is none of this “traditional boss fight at the end of each level” here. Instead, while there are bosses, they are few and far between and each level is populated with a handful of enemies that follow predictable patterns, easily shot down by just flying up and down, firing as you go, destroying them before they come onto the screen.
Every now and then, a stronger enemy will appear that requires rather more hits to kill, but these can be ignored or defeated as you choose. The difficulty of Cilla is limp, the enemies are forgettable. But worst of all is what happens when the game thinks it is time for a bit more exposition.
In the middle of a mission that is apparently of the utmost importance, Cilla takes a break to deliver a series of text heavy cutscenes. Not only do these kill any flow that you may have got going, they are also badly written. I’m not sure what language the dialogue was in originally, but after a bout of Google Translate, it certainly hasn’t ended up being in English. The dialogue is so overblown and dramatic that it is laughable, and multiple times I asked myself why I was being put through this torture. Luckily, you can skip the cutscenes, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you do so.
The gameplay isn’t really up to scratch either, comprising of whatever the opposite of a bullet hell is, with approximately half a dozen bullets fired at you at any one time. Consider that the story is not only poorly written but very poorly presented, and I guess it is up to the presentation of the game to ride to the rescue and pull it out of the fire. Sadly, it isn’t able to do that either.
You see, Cilla is touted as having a pixel art style, with meticulously crafted backdrops and hand drawn landscapes. These are all quotes from the store page, but whilst it is fine looking at screenshots, the backdrops and landscapes are dull in motion, and the same cookie cutter enemies appear through all the levels and are basically cannon fodder. Further, the bosses are poorly designed and have some weird mechanics. In the first boss fight, we are confronted with a wall – of all things. But not any old wall, this is a wall rampaging through a city (?). When it shot at me, sometimes I could shoot the enemy bullets, and then, inexplicably, I couldn’t. Then I could again. Inconsistency should possibly be the subtitle of this game…
You may get the impression from reading this review that I didn’t particularly like Cilla, and that is for a very good reason – I didn’t. There’s hardly any action to get stuck into in Cilla, the story is poorly presented, running a twist that can be seen a mile away and it doesn’t look great.
Cilla is up there with the worst shoot ‘ems up I’ve played this year, and has a strong shout of making it into my personal all-time worst top 5. One to stay away from.
