Tengoku: Eternal Sunset is a well polished danmaku/bullet hell game with good amounts of bullet patterns and challenging boss fight. The main character, Angelica is an angel and has to fight through 5 stages consisting of several types of enemies and three bosses. In the final stage, the entanglement theme is part of the game mechanic where the three bosses share a single their health pool.
Magical Girl Concept:
Angelica displays magical powers of flight and is able to fire bullets or lasers. Her full character design isn't present in the game but it can be seen from her top down sprite that she has angel wings which is a magical girl trait.
Visual:
The art style is simple and clean with little complexity in the character designs. The number of sprites used in the game are sufficient for a small bullet hell game and the color composition is spot on, where the bullets are brightly colored and enemies don't blend with the background, allowing players to identify both bullet and enemy positions. The minimalist style background isn't too distracting and it gives a good sense of the environment where each of the stages are being held. UI art and layout are neatly done with all the necessary indicators placed on the right side of the screen while the title is placed on the bottom right. The UI style resembles a Touhou game which if not mistaken is the developer's main intention.
Audio:
The music tracks used in the game is catchy and matches well in each stages. A good number of sound effects are applied to most actions in the game from firing bullets to enemies dying.
Theme:
The developer picked Energy and Entanglement where both themes have been successfully applied in the game mechanics where the first involves collecting energy and the second is during the final boss stage where the three bosses share one single health bar.
Challenge / Engagement:
There are three difficulty settings in the game ranging from easy to hard and an additional 1 cc play through in order to reach the true ending. The game is quite challenging between the difficult as the hard mode makes the enemies take more hits and seem to be a lot faster than the other two modes. Besides that, essential drops like the life, and bomb feels a lot less in hard mode. In other words, the scale of difficulty seem to correlate with the enemy difficulty and drop probability while not affecting the enemy spawn count or bullet pattern. Besides that, the player starts off with less health and bomb count. Besides that the challenge also comes from the enemy behavior where they are able to aim and fire at the players in any direction. Moving on, the story is written without any issues but it is quite short and most of it is just regular banter between the boss character and the player character. In other words, the story doesn't have much development or that further reveals the situation as to the opening description to the game.
Overall:
The game has good ground work done with almost no lag or gameplay issues, I have a stable 60 fps throughout the game even during boss fights with heavy bullet spawns. The game has more than enough content to be considered complete but additional UI like the settings menu and having an in-game menu will definitely complete the game further. The minimal art style gives the game a unique sense of it feeling like an arcade game. The game is easy to pick up with the familiar control scheme.
Reviewer notes: This review was done via HTML5 on Firefox browser and on hard mode till the end of stage 4. Final boss stage was evaluated in easy mode.