Shmups, especially the bullet hell variety, have always been about dancing. It’s just that this particular type of dancing involves elegantly dodging hundreds of bullets. It’s not too surprising, then, that MixedBag Games should describe the control method for its upcoming shmup Gemini_X as “stick dancing.”
After having played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons—which has you controlling two brothers on an analog stick each—MixedBag decided that this control type could be used with the shmup genre pretty well. This was the birth of Gemini_X.
In Gemini_X, you control two ships at the same time, but independently, using a stick for each of them. So, instead of shooting upwards, you attack enemies by shooting a large laser beam between the two ships. As you do this, angling the two ships to hit the enemies, you also need to dodge bullets with both the ships too.
In the game’s world, these two ships are piloted by the genetically created twins Akai and Aoi, and their mission is to liberate Earth from an alien invasion. It’s inspired specifically, at least in its look, by Sega’s Model 2 and 3 Japanese coin-op arcade games from the ‘90s.
Currently, Gemini_X is in its most basic stage, and is one of several projects that MixedBag is working on, but the studio has released the teaser you can watch above. No platforms have been announced for the game yet but it’s built in Unity 5 so it has the potential to come to PC, consoles, and mobile.
