Schildmaid MX Review - A Little Off Target
I love a good shmup as they’re one of the purest challenges between a player and the computer. A test of your reflexes and memory against everything the computer can throw at you, all in service of earning those high scores.
After a PC release a few years ago, Schildmaid MX has made the jump to consoles, and aims to bring its twists to the shmup formula to a new audience with its more defensive take on the genre.
Off the bat, the story is pretty threadbare, putting the focus on the blasting action. I’ve got no issue with this, as a good shooter doesn’t need to live or die by its story, and I’d rather see small indie teams like this focus on the mechanics over the story.
Which is where Schildmaid MX stands out, as it’s all about the bullets as colliding with one won’t take you out, but instead activates your shield. Colliding with further bullets will work towards levelling up your weapons, at least until your shield has fully drained. Once this happens, you’ll have to wait, Halo style, for it to recharge before doing it again. The real scoring potential comes from keeping it active by blasting enemies away. Doing this also raises your score multiplier, which is where the real scoring opportunities come in.
I find it makes for a very cool risk vs. reward scheme, as prime scoring potential comes from not triggering your shields until enough enemies are on screen, but also taking them out at the right pace. Do it too fast, and you can’t keep your shield going, but too slow, and you’ll be overwhelmed by the threats. But the reward is successfully earning as many points as possible, which helps you work towards extra lives and more.
What I dig is how it pushes the risk side of things, as not everything fired at you can be absorbed, with some enemies launching missiles which need some deft dodging to survive. Others fire gigantic laser beams, which can trap you or be aimed at you. If a missile hits, you’ll lose a life, while contact with a laser drains your shield energy at a rapid rate, killing you once empty.
As neat a trick as I found the lasers to be, they also fed into one of my frustration points in working to master Schildmaid MX. Lasers can be fired from fixed enemies or mobile ones. The patterns for the former are easy to learn and avoid, but with the latter, I found the combination of the size and the way they’re fired at you meant you could be trapped in unavoidable positions, which is a problem when you need to have mobility to get anywhere.
It’s a frustration amplified as both these laser-spewing enemies, along with others, take quite a few hits before blowing up. For me, good shmup design is about balancing waves of “popcorn” enemies (those which can be quickly defeated), with more threatening foes. For me, if every enemy requires focused effort to defeat, then it’s very easy to be trapped by them, making it easy to fall out of the zone and not have a good time.
As a result, I found myself fatigued after each run, which I feel isn’t a good feeling. A good shmup will make you want to dive back in to try again, to see if you can push further, and whether you can avoid the mistakes you made last time. But with Schildmaid MX, I just found myself annoyed and wanting to exit after a single run each time.
Thankfully, there are a few game modes available to play, but the way they’re unlocked did annoy me. Essentially, you’re forced to play its tutorial, which does a solid job of covering the basics, but not so much on the UI side of things. It took me a few plays to understand what was going on there, and I can’t help but feel a little concerned for how new players will see things, especially if they need that tutorial to understand the tricks and rules.
Once you’re done with that, you’ll have to play and earn credits to unlock the successive modes. The main game has two variations in an easier and a harder mode. The former is shorter, but also adds in checkpoints to resume and continue from. The latter lacks those and can be seen as the real challenge for those to master.
Beyond that are a pair of challenge modes, which turn the difficulty up even further and serve as shorter, more intense challenges, which I can appreciate as being more for those who’ve mastered the base game, over being a different way to experience things. Despite all that, Schildmaid MX does give you a few tricks to balance the challenge, namely through that training mode, which you can return to as you progress through the game. As you return, you’ll find that the levels you’ve reached in the various modes are available to try, so you can practice memorising the tricks and traps of each level.
Which means if you want to master that harder mode, it’ll help you prepare to get into the zone for beating it. Now that’s genuinely the true challenge of a shmup, and for the most part, I find it’s more than a fair challenge, just with a few bits of frustration, namely around the visuals, as I found at times being taken out by something that wasn’t quite apparent.
To me is a bad thing in a shmup; you really need projectiles and enemies to be clear against backgrounds, and though you can enable object outlines, it doesn’t help as much as I’d have liked. For me, this was probably what wore me down the most. I was happy enough to have beaten the easiest of the modes, but finding these little hurdles and hiccups made wanting to push onto those harder ones not worth my time.
Schildmaid MX aims high in trying to introduce a unique system to differentiate itself from other shooters, but for me, it didn’t quite nail it, which saddens me, as with a little fine tuning and tweaking, it would have made for a great experience, making it one for shmup fans who are more dedicated to wanting to learn the ins and the outs of it.
Schildmaid MX was reviewed on PS5 with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
