The Haunted Hoard: Silver Bullet (Switch)

This year’s Haunted Hoard has been themed around retro games with a few more modern titles sprinkled in, but including a game that was releasing during The Haunted Hoard almost feels like it would have been against the spirit of this year’s theming. However, despite Silver Bullet literally releasing on the day of this review’s publication, it felt like a solid fit for a retro-themed year. With its old school spritework and arcade style adventure, this modern throwback didn’t seem like it would be out of place beside games from the 90s.

 

While Van Helsing was resting peacefully in his home with his dog Silver, the minions of Reggie the vampire show up in the night and spirit away Helsing’s seven pet puppies. Rushing off with a rapid fire crossbow, Van Helsing has to fight his way through various haunted locales to reach the vampire in charge and save his little doggies, and while the quest is suitably spooky and leans sometimes on expected villains, you’ll also end up in a few more unusual situations. One of the first levels will be outside a rundown old manor with plenty of ghosts and witches to shoot at, but later on you find yourself in a dinosaur exhibit at a museum where some surprisingly smart cavemen turn their robotic rexes against you. You’re more likely to be shooting zombies and skeletons than anything else though, Van Helsing’s adventure certainly putting spookiness first before you see things like the surprisingly bright neon designs of the Egyptian level.

For the most part, Silver Bullet is a shooter where you move your cursor around the screen to unload on the supernatural threats that oppose you. Your rapid fire crossbow won’t let you down, working more like a machine gun, and with how many enemies can flood the screen at once, you’ll find you are more than equipped to sweep your crosshairs across them and take out the hordes. However, if you care for score, you’ll see that firing without much thought won’t get you in the leaderboards. Accuracy is an important part of score chasing, missed shots gradually decreasing your rating that in turn decreases the value of the points food dropped by the baddies you’re blasting. Beyond shooting monsters to preserve your own safety and earn points though, there are also specific foes or objects that drop gold coins when destroyed, the player sometimes asked if they’ll prioritize their safety or earning this precious resource for the fairly common shop between stages. The shop will allow you to buy incredibly helpful items, such as an extra life or a shield to prevent damage from an incoming shot, because while you can blast down droves of the living dead with ease, one hit landing on Helsing is enough to kill him, with the player having a set amount of lives and continues to tackle the main adventure with.

 

Luckily, Van Helsing isn’t totally vulnerable. While he can only run left to right, you can press a button to parry a shot that’s about to hit you, or more importantly, you can routinely use a dash attack to zip around the lower area. The dash will bash through any enemies on the ground level, and since Helsing will only die if a small marked spot on his body is hit by an attack, you can weave through onslaughts of incoming attacks with a surprisingly responsive and precise dash. You’ll likely want to play with the twin stick controls so you can easily aim your cursor somewhat independently of moving Van Helsing, but you’ll definitely find keeping yourself safe as important as keeping up the pressure on monsters and bosses. Silver Bullet is not afraid to near bullet hell levels of on-screen attacks, bosses especially bombarding you with a great deal of colorful energy bullets with small spots to slip between if you wish to survive. It isn’t a relentless bullet hell, most regular stages start as shooting galleries of a sort where attacks do come towards you in numbers but not to such an oppressive degree. You also have a bit of an ace in the hole, your dog Silver showing up if you can build up your special meter enough. Launching him at enemies will briefly freeze the action, makes you temporarily invincible for a bit after, and Silver not only will deal heavy damage to whatever he hits, but he will convert incoming fire into points food to help clear you a path and earn points. A second dog, Dogenstein, can even be bought at the shop so you have two pooches to launch in moments you might need to save yourself, gathering gold coins made an even more important prospect by how much room it can give you so you can make it to the final fight with Reggie.

Silver Bullet has a pretty good range of creative enemy layouts and bosses. The giant skeleton head capping off the theme park section at first uses his fists to try and limit your walking space so his bullet rain can more easily target you, the Egyptian level has you breaking a safe path through falling blocks to avoid getting crushed, and most levels even have little bonus goals or hidden items to find to encourage you to shoot suspicious things. You can even unlock a special minigame inspired by Tetris, the player able to fire upon the falling blocks to change their shape and still assembling rows of them to earn points, but you are the one who is asked to clear rows with rows placed higher in a pile earning more points. It’s a balancing act of finding out how much room you can afford to sacrifice in favor of earning higher points, and it’s only one of a few little minigames in Silver Bullet. Between the more traditional shooting levels, there are also smaller bonus games you are allowed to lose without penalty, but they can be a great source of points. Whether it’s shooting at skeletons in vehicles trying to scoop up pups or keeping bubbling potions from getting out of control, these stages are pretty good at decompressing after the more demanding bullet dodging mayhem of a regular level. Silver Bullet isn’t overly long, which helps because you will likely get a few full Game Overs along the way learning what lies ahead, and while some of the simpler stages do get a bit repetitive to play again and again, there is definitely a thrill to having a level that once burned through your available lives turn into one you can clear without getting hit. The fact you can’t just play to the end with infinite continues makes the shops so valuable and adds an extra layer of thought to this shooter.

 

Silver Bullet also lets you play any level you’ve cleared in the main adventure separately, nominally to set individual scores but it also provides a decent place to train if you need to get better at avoiding damage before the later levels. Even when the screen feels like it’s covered in deadly dangers there’s always room to stay alive, even some of Reggie’s most dangerous tricks when you encounter him being the kind of thing you can learn on the fly without necessarily needing to die to it to understand. You’ll most definitely be caught by surprise as you’re still learning the different ways the game is willing to attack you, but your dash always feels up to the task, the player definitely needing to fit into tight spaces during specific situations but you can easily split your attention between survival and keeping your weapon aimed at the right target. Silver Bullet is the kind of creative adventure you want to see keep going because of the range of interesting monsters you encounter along the way, but it would likely strain the arcade mode’s focus on a set amount of continues to see you to the end. Too long and it could become overly frustrating to try and beat it in one run, but Silver Bullet finds a good spot when it comes to requiring some mastery to win while you do have room for some slip-ups along the way to that victory.

THE VERDICT: Silver Bullet is a difficult but thrilling throwback with a spooky look and satisfying shooting. Having to weave through a bevy of bullets to take down massive monsters isn’t initially easy, but learning what’s ahead, managing your gold well at the shops, and fighting your way deeper into the adventure is exciting and fast-paced with some nice simpler bonus games thrown in so you aren’t constantly in demanding life and death dodge fests. Your dash gives you the perfect tool for staying safe, the player never questioning the fairness of the action when you’ve got strong tools to stay alive. With some creative boss fights to top off its stages, Silver Bullet feels like it gets it style from the past but smart ideas on how to make it play more cleanly from the present.

 

And so, I give Silver Bullet for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD rating. Some modern throwbacks will keep the arcade style of limited continues to their detriment, not really building around the idea and mostly doing it simply because that’s how it was done in the past. Silver Bullet though approaches the design with a good degree of thought, the adventure spaced out so you can build up resources and gradually learn your way through without the end feeling absurdly distant when you do fall and need to retry from the start. Admittedly, your skill will get honed to the point the early levels start to offer little, the player’s ability past the point where the initial stages will trouble them so revisiting them does get a bit repetitive. On the other hand, if you do believe yourself proficient enough at dodging bullets, getting to the finale shouldn’t take too many tries, the player needing to develop their movement skills to survive but Silver Bullet doesn’t feel like the kind of game that takes overly long to master. After you have cleared it, there are secrets, the leaderboard, and the block minigame to occupy you, but it does feel like the push to save the puppies from Reggie is the main concern and it would have been nice to see a second adventure or some other way to expand the offerings without bloating the excellently paced set of levels on offer here.

 

Silver Bullet offers a nice range of Halloween fiends, fun twists on how you’re attacked to make dodging the most exciting part of the equation, and stages that ask you to think about what and how you’re shooting without it pulling too much attention away from surviving the incoming bullet floods. Little touches like accuracy being a bit lenient so you don’t have to fret about your scoring being impacted by your machine gun of a crossbow missing a bit keeps the action energetic and makes score chasing easy to mix in with your survival concerns, Silver Bullet’s retro sensibilities only enhancing it while it had the good sense on how to adjust familiar old ideas just right to become a more engaging experience.