Shooting Chicken Brutal Suckers is a 2D run & gun that sees our young waitress Makoto Yonekura finding a creepy-looking chicken in the chef’s kitchen one day. This apparently being a common enough occurrence that the chef teaches us how to deal with it. We have four weapons at our disposal, ranging from our dual shotguns to a flamethrower that we will soon have to put to good use. It may seem like a bit overkill given the circumstances, yet before long, we’ll have a tunnel drilled straight into our restaurant with an out-pour of those feathery fiends emerging.
Blasting them away with our overwhelming weaponry is simple enough, but there is a unique feature that will help us greatly if we master it. It involves shooting white chickens with a shotgun, setting it on fire with your flamethrower, and finally shooting its head off using your magnum. Pulling this off correctly will net you a cooked chicken to restore some health and a good chunk of points for your highscore/currency. This specific combination of attacks is not easy to do and much less so in the heat of battle. There are other items that can heal health scattered throughout the level, yet mastering the art of cooking a chicken in such a matter is worth the risk for those willing to attempt it.
If I had to give an analogy as to how this game plays, I’d say imagine Metal Slug combined with Serious Sam. You need to make good use of your weapons strengths and learn how to maneuver around massive groups of foes. Near every enemy damages us on contact, and being in 2D, our only option is to jump over them or take them down before they reach you. There are multiple types of chickens slowly introduced throughout the five stages, each containing unique ways of trying to take you down. You’ll need to have a good sense of your current situation and fast reactions to survive this avian invasion. As much as this looks like a meme game, it is not. This title feels like it belongs in the arcades, as strange as that sounds.
Starting off, we only have the Normal difficulty to choose from. Scoring points is important as it can also bring currency to upgrade our weapons, yet the sheer challenge it offers is what reminded me most of the arcade experience. This is not an easy game. You will have to earn your way to the ending credits, which you’ll then be greeted with another higher difficulty to tackle if you dare. Playing it through Normal is by no means a brutal experience, yet it does ask a lot of the player. If you are here solely for the novelty, you should probably be aware of that. This a Run & Gun that will require your full attention, and one for those more or less experienced with the genre.
With that said, if you cook the white chickens with the aforementioned weapon combination, that will net you a good amount of currency. Within an in-game shop, you can then upgrade every weapon and even purchase infinite ammo to help you overcome the odds. It is disappointing how much of the overall currency comes from cooking chickens, also known as the Yakitori Combo. You get next to nothing by simply playing the game, and pulling off that combo is not very fun. You will need to grind out money by doing that instead of getting better at the game itself should you require the extra help. The increased score makes sense, yet the money acquisition being all but solely focused on it was a mistake, in my opinion.
Something that you’d likely noticed by now is the timer smack dab on the middle of the screen. Should that reach zero, you will die on the spot. Increasing your score is a key factor in extending your time left, and there are also items to increase it. Without making use of the Yakitori Combo, however, it is unlikely you’ll be able to beat the level before it hits zero. The penalty of death is pretty lenient here. You will simply be required to start at the beginning of a section, of which there are several that compose the overall stage. The critical thing to keep an eye on is the heart icon next to your character portrait. Should that ever become empty after dying too much, it will be a game over and back to the very start of the stage again.
If you haven’t picked up on it by now, this title has a lot of depth. The wacky theme of it is by no means the only selling point here. Chief among these features that make you think as much as you shoot are the grenades. You will usually have a ton, and they kill most anything caught in its explosion with a single blast. There is no splash damage to your player character either, so you’ll be able to pepper the battlefield with explosions. That makes it all the more interesting that doing so is still incredibly dangerous toward you. Explosions can damage the environment, thus creating more death pits you need to risk jumping over or stalagmites in a cave coming loose on top of your head. These hazards and more can be used to your advantage, but wildly chucking grenades will make it much more likely for them to be your downfall.
Keeping on with the topic of grenades, the animation to throw them is insanely long. Chances are high that you’ll take damage as you waste time trying to throw them, and worse still is that any amount of damage interrupts the animation. This means that nothing will be thrown if you get hit as your character tries to go for the longest video game record of how long it takes to throw a grenade. Oddly enough, throwing one mid-air is near-instantaneous. If you are going to make any use out of them, you need to jump first. I don’t know if that was a design decision or not, yet it really does not mesh well with the fast-paced nature of this title. Everything else from switching weapons, shooting, or jumping feels great and keeps you in full control with nothing to blame if something goes wrong.
All of the regular grunt enemies are chicken-based. You have a metal chicken that is highly resistant to anything other than the magnum or a grenade. A small and difficult to hit baby chick that will violently lunge if you take too long slaying it. Or just your regular chicken that puts its vast numbers to good use, among others I’ll leave for you to discover. As bizarre as this title is, the boss fights are where it really lets its insanity shine. Said bosses are the only thing keeping you from finishing the level once you reach them. From weird eldritch tentacles that birth hellish chickens to a giant realistic spider, it is a lot to take in when first meeting one. Don’t gawk too long, however. They certainly won’t waste any time going on the offensive, and a few can even kill you near instantly.
Each boss is quite unique in everything from its appearance to how it attacks. They were all a ton of fun to fight, with the ending having the best one of them all. You will not get much in the way of a story, yet the lack of needing to explain anything leads to many wonderfully strange events. In total, it took me an hour & a half to complete these five stages. This includes when I got a game over and had to complete stage 3 again. Afterward, I headed over to the Ultimate Battle mode, which is essentially a boss rush where you can adjust a few things like enemy HP or damage. You then have to take on all five bosses using without dying a single time. This is a perfect pick-up and play mode where one can simply go wild or practice.
With the higher difficulty now unlocked from beating the campaign, I’m more than tempted to replay it in the near future. I would also like to try to get through it on Normal all in one life. It provokes that same feeling of wanting to master it like the games of old. The diagonal shooting can be kind of clunky, and the insanely long animation to throw a grenade was an objectionably terrible decision, but it is a solid experience. The hidden depth, like being able to shoot a grenade mid-air to cause it to explode sooner and the controls good enough to let you do so go a long way. There are a ton of enemies to shoot at any given moment, heavy metal blaring in the background as you fight what appear to be rubber chickens, and a remarkable competency behind the insanity. Priced at under ten US Dollars, Shooting Chicken Brutal Suckers is well worth the admission fee for fans of the genre.
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