Sisters Royale: Five Sister's Under Fire

Sisters Royale is the new hectic shoot em up from the team at Alfa System. The game came out for the Switch and PS4 earlier this year, and now as of July 10th it has come to the Xbox One. If you love crazy bullet hell shooters this is a game that will be worth your time to check out. The story begins telling of an ancient prophecy featuring 5 sisters who combine their magic powers to defeat the evil Seytan. When 5 sisters were born, everyone was sure they would be saved. Unfortunately for them they never realized there was one huge obstacle in their way. Not the bad guy but the fact the sisters despised each other and were fighting over the same boy. Who happens to also be an angel. They would never willingly work together. This is definitely not one of your stereotypical games where the heroes rises up to save everyone by defeating the bad guy. There is a lot of squabbling and animosity between the sisters you will have to deal with.

You start the game by choosing one of the sisters to play as. Each sister has unique attacks like a spread shot, bomb, summons and powers. The are all drawn in an anime style and some of the sisters are better "well endowed" than their siblings which leads to some resentment. The game has a power boost mechanic that rewards players that take big risks, if you do you will get big rewards. A lot of things will affect your score like your distance from the enemy when you defeat them, the amount of secret fairies you find and the Power-shot System. The story mode on the game does not take a very long time to beat. On Easy difficulty you can easily complete it in under an hour but you are given a report card at the end that will grade you on how many lives you used, continues needed, score, coins collected and other criteria. This definitely adds to the replayability to the game. My first time through I got a grade E, I used a lot of continues figuring out the controls and how everything worked because I was stubborn and didn't do the training.

The stages you go through have you fighting and avoiding fire from a lot of different enemies. They feature bright colors and different themes depending on which sister you are fighting. At the mid point there is a strong cube like mid boss and at the end of the stage you face off against your sister. The game is a vertical auto scrolling shooter like Axelay on the SNES if you are old enough to remember that one. So if you try to hang all the way back on the bottom of the screen you will get forcibly pushed to keep you moving. The boss battles are timed so if you take too long you will lose.

If easy isn't enough of a challenge for you there are also the Normal and Hard modes and the option to customize how the beserk attacks work. I have played a lot of shoot em up type games like this over the years but I was definitely challenged trying to avoid all the enemy attacks coming at me here. I am excited to try all the other sisters and see what kind of attacks they have to use and find my favorite style.

Will you be victorious and defeat your sisters to win the heart of Yashin? Will the sisters ever stop fighting and work together to defeat the bad guy Seytan who has been tormenting the people? Find out and try out Sisters Royale on the Xbox store for $13.99 and see if you are good enough to take a place on the online leaderboard. I have a lot more training to do before I get to that point!

If you like games that don't require a huge time commitment to complete and a high score challenge this one is a lot of fun!

Alana Dunitz