Under Defeat is a remaster of a remaster of a game originally released in arcades in 2005 and was then one of the last Dreamcast games ever released in 2006 - only in Japan, of course. A remaster was released on Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2012, which added proper widescreen support among other things. Amazingly, surprisingly, since I was knee deep in covering everything Xbox 360 back in 2012, this game completely passed me by. I had no idea it existed. So my first experience with Under Defeat is playing this new remaster on Xbox Series X. I like it. I like it a lot.
Part of why I like it is that it's a deliciously old school type of shmup. Most modern shmups, released in the last 20 years or so, have tons of difficulty options and unlimited continues and other things to make them more accessible so more people can actually get through them. I love that. I love having those options. I wouldn't be as big of a shoot-em-up fan as I am now without all of those options. And I'll fully admit that I still usually play on normal or even easy.
Oldschool shmups, of course, didn't have any of that. You'd pay $40 or $50 and get a totally brutal and punishing and relentless game that you might not ever get passed the second level. I have to confess that I didn't like the genre that much back then. They were too hard and felt like a waste of money to me.
This new release of Under Defeat follows that old school shmup playbook. You only have limited continues and even "easy" mode is still incredibly difficult. It's very hard. It's a bit unfair even, actually. But it's available at a very reasonable $20 MSRP. And, somehow, I assume because I have this many more years of age and experience, playing Under Defeat with all of its difficulty actually feels really good to me personally here in 2025.
Under Defeat is a helicopter shmup where the main gameplay gimmick is that you tilt your craft to be able to hit enemies from different angles. The tilt in arcade mode is about 30 degrees but New Order Mode is about 45 degrees and New Order Mode Pus allows you to tilt to almost 90 degrees, which even though the levels are the same, having that much more maneuverability in the angles you can attack from totally changes the way the game plays.
It isn't a bullet hell, so you aren't really ever overwhelmed with bullets onscreen, which makes avoiding enemy bullets not that difficult, but it's still very hard for other reasons. The first reason is that your hitbox seems to be massive. Bullet hell shmups aren't actually that difficult because the hit box is teeny tiny, even a single pixel sometimes, so dodging through clouds of bullets isn't actually as bad as it seems.
Under Defeat just seems to have a comparably huge hitbox, so even though there aren't that many bullets onscreen, I still seem to get hit a lot. The other issue is that the levels and enemies are pretty much all gray and brown and blend together, which means enemies or itty bitty missiles I didn't even see crash into me a lot and I die. That's kinda not good.
Because the game isn't actually all that overwhelming, however, you do start to figure out how big your hitbox is and what you can and can't do. That feeling of steady improvement and progression is the whole appeal of playing shmups, and Under Defeat does a very good job of keeping you engaged. You learn where the enemies are going to spawn, so you don't run into them, and the bullet patterns are always consistent, so you steadily get better at it.
Would I like even more if it had unlimited continues and more granular difficulty adjustment like modern games? Yes. Absolutely. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't. But I also kind of like it specifically because you really have to fight and earn every inch of progress you make. Like I said at the top, it's come full circle around to where "too difficult" is like a breath of fresh air in 2025. I haven't even gotten passed chapter 2-1 yet and I've still had a great time and feel like I've already gotten my $20 worth out of it.
With that said, though, it's still definitely a hardcore old school style shmup that won't appeal to everyone. Under Defeat has always been notorious for being difficult, and its review scores have suffered with every release because of that fact, and that is still absolutely the case here. If you are a shoot-em-up fan, though, and are willing to stick with a tough game and really learn to play it properly, Under Defeat is well worth playing in 2025.
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