Bullet♥ Review – Sweaty Hands and the 90s Arcade Panic

Bullet Heart is another one-of-a-kind experience delivered by those lunatics over at Level 99 Games. Between this and Empyreal Spells & Steam, they must be running out of ideas soon right?

If you’ve never heard of Bullet♥︎, then think back to the 90s, when there was an epidemic of arcades across the world. During this time, games like Raiden or Ikaruga were all the rage. Where you play a spaceship dodging missiles, bullets, and anything else flying in your direction. Although, these days you can find the same mechanics in games like Binding of Isaac, or Nuclear Throne.

Bullet♥︎ brings these well-known mechanics to the tabletop in a series of timed, three-minute rounds. During each round, you draw tokens, or bullets, from a bag and place them on your player board. Where you place them depends on the colour of the bullet, as it goes in a matching-coloured column.

These bullets are also numbered, denoting how many rows down your board they end at. Although they jump over any bullets already placed. For example, a blue number-two bullet is placed in the blue column two spaces from the top. However, if there was already a bullet in one of those spaces. Then, this bullet would be placed in the third space in the column.

This creates a waterfall effect, where the more bullets you place, the closer the new bullets get to the bottom of the board. When they eventually reach the bottom you’ll take damage. Take more damage than your character has health, and you’re eliminated from the game.

Four Layers of Learning

Thankfully, to help you remove bullets from your player board are character-specific special powers. These allow you to move bullets around and fill in pattern cards. Which, once filled, removes swathes of bullets.

Each bullet removed is stored off the side of your player board. Ready to be delivered to your opponent’s next round. This creates a fun physical metric showing how successful you’ve been. And if you do well enough, your friend’s face will share the same wide-eyed look the 300 Spartans had when they saw the Persians arrive.

It’s a neat feature, but what makes Bullet stand out is that it’s a board game where you can see yourself improve the more you play. This process of learning is addicting.

There are four distinct layers to this learning:

1. When you first begin playing Bullet, your only thought is survival and making it to the next round.
2. Once you feel comfortable, you begin to feel your heroine’s powers. Each heroine manipulates bullets on their board differently, while also having unique patterns. Understanding both of these allows you to clear bullets quicker and more efficiently.
3. Now, things are going great it’s time to go on the offensive. There are special bullets with stars on them, removing these gives you more ammunition for abilities. So at this stage, you start to arrange your patterns around these star bullets and begin thinking beyond the next move.
4. Time to start putting thought into your attack. Instead of playing defensive and focusing on survival, start thinking about which bullets you’re clearing and how they’re going to affect the opponents. For example, focusing on sending green bullets when the next player already has trouble in that column.

Don’t Think Too Much!

While this sounds smart and might lure you into thinking Bullet Heart is a strategic game. The truth is it’s anything but. With the three-minute timer, you throw any long-term planning out the window in favour of focusing on doing the best you can right this very second.

This leads to a lot of risk-taking and sweating hands as you flip-flop between playing it safe and playing it efficiently.

It’s the combination of push-your-luck and tactical pattern matching that keeps Bullet♥︎ never far from my playing table. Add on eight unique characters and four distinct modes of play, and you’ve got yourself a game that I’m very excited about playing again and again.

Ultimately, Bullet Heart succeeds at doing what it set out to do: emulate a bullet hell style game. It’s a 20-minute game, including setup, but has enough layers and addictive gameplay that you’ll be playing it for a lot longer.