Who's That Flying?!

Lore & Background

The game's story is told retrospectively from the narrative point of the Guardian of the Earth, as he stands trial before the representatives of other planets at the Galactic Council of Space Justice. The campaign contains 40 story levels set across multiple cities of Earth, with animated cutscenes of the trial. There are 17 types of opponents and 5 boss battles, along with 4 levels of infinity mode and 24 levels in challenge mode. The visuals are in a cartoon style with vivid colours and simple animations.

Reader's Guide

Who's That Flying?! received generally favorable reviews on all platforms according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Many publications praised its hybrid gameplay and presentation, highlighting the game's charming personality and humour. Eurogamer praised its engaging shoot 'em up mechanics, while IGN noted that it is a polished release, balancing the sometimes monotonous levels with the interesting challenge mode. Several reviewers commended its comic-styled visuals, engaging boss fights, and replay value through challenge and infinite modes, though some noted that the core campaign could feel short or repetitive to seasoned players. Overall, the title was regarded as an enjoyable and inventive take on the 2D shooter genre, especially given its modest scope and price point.

Did You Know?

• The player character, the Guardian of the Earth, cannot die from enemy fire; instead, enemies that slip past damage the city's health pool.
• Destroying enemies builds a power meter that unlocks temporary weapon upgrades such as enhanced rapid fire and powerful laser attacks.
• The story is told from the perspective of the Guardian standing trial before the Galactic Council of Space Justice.
• The game includes 24 challenge mode levels and 4 infinity mode levels in addition to the 40-level campaign.

Origins and the Golden Age

The shoot 'em up genre traces its lineage to mid-twentieth-century electro-mechanical target-shooting cabinets, yet it did not appear in digital video-game form until Spacewar! in 1962. The true structural template, however, was set in 1978 when Space Invaders became a massive arcade hit, establishing the broad conventions that would define the category and spawning a wave of imitators. The following year brought further mechanical refinement through titles like Asteroids and Galaxian, which expanded the genre's vocabulary. Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the form enjoyed mainstream popularity and branched out into numerous subcategories, including scrolling shooters, run-and-gun titles, and rail shooters. This era of diversification cemented the design language that would later become the genre's defining, self-referential identity.

Core Gameplay and the Demand for Reflex

At its heart, a shoot 'em up places the player in the seat of a vehicle or spacecraft under relentless assault, viewed from a top-down or side perspective. The central challenge is deceptively simple: fire at anything that moves while dodging incoming fire, all while racing toward a level-ending boss encounter. Success demands split-second reactions and the ability to internalize enemy attack patterns, making the genre one of the fastest-paced in all of gaming. Notably, these titles almost never simulate realistic physics; ships pivot instantly without inertia, and projectiles travel in perfectly straight lines at fixed speeds. Energy beams may bend at right angles or track their target. Players collect power-ups that grant shields, extra lives, or upgraded weaponry, and because ammunition is rarely tracked, the default strategy is to fire indiscriminately at every moving object on screen.

A Taxonomy of Movement and Perspective

The genre is typically classified by how the player moves and what perspective the camera adopts. Fixed shooters confine both player and enemies to a single screen, with movement restricted to one axis—back and forth along the bottom in Space Invaders, or vertically along the right edge in Pooyan. Multidirectional shooters free the protagonist to rotate and travel in any of 360 degrees, as in Asteroids, while twin-stick variants like Robotron: 2084 add a second joystick for independent aiming. Tube shooters such as Tempest and Gyruss send the craft through an abstract tunnel, technically a fixed-axis subset. Rail shooters lock the player to a predetermined path while offering an 'into the screen' viewpoint, exemplified by Space Harrier, Star Fox, and Panzer Dragoon. A further branch, the light-gun shooter, replaces the stick with a physical gun for titles like Virtua Cop and The House of the Dead.

From Mainstream to Niche: The Bullet Hell Era

By the mid-1990s, the shoot 'em up had shed its broad mainstream appeal and settled into a specialized niche, particularly in Japan, where it evolved into an inward-looking genre defined by the design conventions of its 1980s heyday. The most extreme expression of this turn is the 'bullet hell' subgenre, in which the screen is saturated with overwhelming numbers of enemy projectiles arranged in visually striking, almost choreographed formations. Surviving these barrages requires not just fast reflexes but deep memorization of pattern sequences, pushing the genre's demand for pattern recognition to its logical extreme. The broader definition of what counts as a shoot 'em up also shifted during this period: earlier critics had labeled any game whose primary mechanic was shooting as a member of the category, but the genre narrowed to a specific, self-referential tradition. Mark Wolf, for instance, draws a line at multiple antagonists, reserving the term 'combat game' for one-on-one shooting encounters.

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