• Playtime: 36 minutes

• Played: 2026

• Context: I have been looking for a shmup like Raptor for decades.

Review

When i was a kid i loved Raptor: Call of the Shadows. It had fantastic midi music, a wide variety of enemies, a bunch of different levels spread across different campaigns, lots of different weapons, quick progression and engaging gameplay involving shooting, dodging, selecting missiles and getting power ups.

Raptor managed to do all that way back in 1994. No other shooter i've played since then comes close. Hyper Echelon is actually similar to the point where i'm absolutely sure it's inspired by Raptor, but it fails. The music is uninteresting. There are really just two different types of weapons. Levels are gated behind annoying quests. Balance is poor. Progression feels off. It doesn't even distinguish between ground and air targets like Raptor did. It also makes you grab money falling down the screen from destroyed enemies, which just feels annoying. And at the end of the first level and probably the others you have to wait for the boss to finish is unskippable dialogue. Ugh.