After so many months of searching, I finally came across this game at the resale store in town today, and HOLY CRAP IT WAS WORTH IT. I'm certainly not the first on the site to rave about it, nor will I probably be the last, but this is one immensely kick-ass shooting game. The theme is unique and silly, the monsters look great, and the difficulties will really kick you in the teeth if you think you're so hot at bullet hells.

Verdict: F*cking Excellent. I don't quite remember who last raved about it and called it the best sh'mup ever, but that's an accolade that might not be totally undeserved. (I have certain reservations about such an extreme statement, as I've still not tried the other CAVE games on 360, any of the Raiden series, or Akai Katana, all of which I've heard are also fantastic).

I've not really got on with many sidescrolling Shmups so far, but wowee this one absolutely rips. Fucking hell it's so good lads. You're a wee anime lassie witch and you fight all sorts of brilliantly designed fantasy monsters in all sorts of incredibly fun areas. You fight a big scythe wielding skeleton. You fight a weird creepy head buried in the ground. You fight an absolutely giant demonic cow! Fuck yes mate, Big Cow Mary! It's a very fun, anime gothic, bullet hell treat. It's quite easy on its standard settings, though a few of the late bosses turn the difficulty curve into a cliff, the last boss especially. Fuck yes mate, Cave were incredible weren't they? Just wall to wall bangers.

Deathsmiles is a horizontal scrolling shmup by CAVE that allows you to shoot left and right, Fantasy Zone style. It bodes 8 stages, one which you can skip.

The game itself lets you choose which stages you want to go to and the difficulty of each. There are 3 stages on the bottom to start and 3 on the top. You alternate between choosing the top and bottom stages. You can choose from difficulty ranks 1 - 3 for each stage. In Arcade mode, it limits you in how many of each Rank 1 and 2 stage you can choose, but not Rank 3.

There's a hidden mode in the game called Death Mode. When you choose Rank 3 difficulty 5 times, you enter Death Mode Level 1. This introduces suicide bullets, where the enemies will throw bullets at you upon death. You can enter Death Mode Level 2 by going to the Gorge or straight to Hades' Castle (the final stage). The Gorge is an extra super difficult level. If you do beat the Gorge, you can enter Death Mode Level 3 for the final stage.

It's the first time CAVE experimented with 3D models and it looks good, though I really don't care for the loli style anime art. The music is very good. Burning Halloween Town and Hades Castle were my two favorites. I used Rosa, as I liked her playstyle, and she's also just really strong.

For my first 1CC of this one, I just did the Arcade mode with stages going Rank 1-1-2-2-3-3. It took me about 3 hours to clear. However, for all Rank 3, it added an additional 12 hours of game time (minus the Gorge, that would have been a lot more difficult). The game has a super high skill ceiling, and tailorable difficulty, with the arrange mode, Mega Black Label, sporting a Rank 999 difficulty, for those willing to take it on.

For general gameplay, you collect items worth different values until you get to 1000. After that, you can activate hyper mode, and item drops will increase, and give you huge score boosts.

Each stage is meticulously built to have a great sense of flow and there's never any down time at all. The new port is also really good, with low input lag and accurate slowdown. This is a good start for beginners looking to get into shoot 'em ups.

Obligatory five-star rating for a CAVE game. There's very few games by this dev that I don't consider a masterpiece.

While I hadn't heard of it until recently, this game has a reputation as a good entry point into the bullet hell genre. I'm not really a huge shmup fan, but I found this game to be an enjoyable experience. You play as one of four witches who move from left to right shooting everything in their paths with their familiars. The girls play mostly the same, with their bullet patterns being the main difference. The levels are very interesting visually, with the bosses in particular having some really great sprite work. I would agree that it is a good entry bullet hell game, not only are you given quite a few lives and infinite continues, but there really isn't a penalty for dying; when you use a continue it respawns you immediately right where you were. This means the game is actually really easy, if you just play it for long enough, you'll eventually reach the end, even if you die 100 times. The game itself is also pretty short, there's only about seven levels (plus a handful of completely optional ones). As for downsides, the game has a large amount of different modes... and zero description about what they do. They have names like "arcade mode", "version 1.1", "black mode", but there's no details about what they do, and I wasn't able to really figure it out myself. This game also runs at a very weird resolution. The gameplay is surrounded by a thick border, meaning the game isn't rendering at full screen. If you saw screenshots, you would probably guess this was a PS1 or Saturn game, but no, it was released in 2009 for the Xbox 360. I have no idea why the game isn't full HD and instead runs this way, it's very odd.

Meh,
Perfect artstyle and pretty fucking good soundtrack but
Difficulty scaling is bad. Last stage was utter shit, it's so fucking long and pointless. It's not hard, It's annoying.

Final boss was fun but I can't say the same to other bosses. They were meaninglessly easy.

Not bad, but not for me neither

Deathsmiles is a REALLY fun, gothic-flavored horizontal-shmup with some killer music and great visuals. It's hands-down one of my all-time favorite shmups, even if I'll likely never get a 1CC on Arcade.

I have a very minor complaint though, in regards to the Steam achievements. They only activate if you're playing the Arcade versions, it can't be Normal or 1.11 versions for achievements UNLESS it specifically mentions one of those versions in the achievement's description. This kind of sucked for me at first because I got quite a few of the character endings while playing the 1.11 versions of both Deathsmiles and Mega Black Label.