Under Defeat (2025) is a remaster of a classic, gorgeous top-down shoot-‘em-up that has finally reached western shores in a modern, definitive form. Originally developed by G.rev for Sega’s NAOMI arcade board for Japanese arcades in 2005, it was ported exclusively to the Dreamcast in Japan the following year, where it enjoyed popular success despite being one of the last games released for the ill-fated console. In 2011, a high-definition remaster of the game, Under Defeat HD was released for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, which added HD visuals, a game soundtrack CD, Japanese DLC and other enhancements. Sadly, this game is hard to come by without spending a lot of money and/or dusting off an old console to play it, so it’s nice that fans finally have a third option.
Under Defeat burns with such late-’90s and early-2000s shmup energy that it somehow managed to find its way to me two decades after its original release—not through a random arcade encounter, but by hearing a track from its 2011 soundtrack playing in the background of a video podcast I was listening to late last year. Upon hearing the re-composed track Go On a Mission, I was compelled to trace the song back to its source, and thus my love affair with the game began. So when the serendipitous opportunity to review Under Defeat for current-gen consoles came along, you can bet my hand immediately went way up.
Under Defeat’s story requires very little explanation: In an alternate-history Second World War setting, The Empire (read: Allied Forces) and The Union (read: Axis Powers) have negotiated an armistice and are on the verge of peace. But as the clock ticks down toward the looming ceasefire, both sides bitterly rage on, unleashing their most powerful and experimental death machines against each other in a last-ditch effort to gain the upper hand. Two female pilots and their VKL5 prototype attack choppers bravely fly into the fray, hoping to turn the tide in their nation’s favour. Isn’t war just fan-tastic? Well, in real life, obviously not, but in the world of Under Defeat, destruction has rarely looked cooler, thanks to the game’s close attention to detail.
“Under Defeat burns with such late-’90s and early-2000s shmup energy that it somehow managed to find its way to me two decades after its original release.”
Trees on the ground below sway, bend and rustle in reaction to both the wind and nearby explosions. Tanks visibly rattle as they roll across uneven terrain or are battered by gunfire, recoiling convincingly when they fire their rounds toward the player’s helicopter. Thick, black smoke billows from the wreckage of destroyed vehicles and gun placements. Downed enemy choppers careen into death spirals and can even collide with the player’s aircraft as they hurtle to the ground. And the number and variety of explosions are simply sublime. Eurogamer once critiqued Under Defeat as resembling “’80s gaming dressed in ’00s visuals running on ’90s hardware,” but it is this very combination that lends the game much of its visual charm.
It’s bizarre to me as a seasoned gamer to feel so much nostalgia for a game I’ve never played or even known anything about, but that notwithstanding, there’s no question that shmups like Under Defeat are hard-coded for Gen-X gamers like me. Its visuals and overall game feel are heavily inspired by ’80s and ’90s-era Japanese top-down and side-scrolling shooters from SNK, Capcom, Toaplan and others, harkening back to a time when franchises like Metal Slug, 194X and Aero Fighters were household names. However, this was also a period when the integration of 2D sprites and 3D polygons in games had become seamlessly advanced enough to no longer appear “shoehorned in.” It could holistically be considered art, even by a casual onlooker.
But enough about the window dressing—let’s talk gameplay. In Under Defeat, up to two players control their own attack helicopter, which is armed with three methods of attack: a Vulcan heavy Gatling gun with bottomless ammo, a limited number of screen-clearing bombs (the player starts with three but can collect up to six at a time on the battlefield) and an independently operated flying turret referred to as “Option.” When active, the Option fires alongside the heli’s Vulcan simultaneously, providing additional firepower for a limited time until it overheats and explodes. The player must refrain from firing long enough for the heli to cool its guns and deploy a new turret, so one must be strategic in order to use the Option to its best advantage.
In addition to extra bombs, destroyed enemies will occasionally release power-ups that bounce and float back and forth across the screen until the player flies over them to pick them up. These power-ups rotate between three ammo types: the standard Vulcan ammo, a powerful Cannon and an even more devastating Rocket. Depending on the active power-up and the situation at hand, the Option will either fire in the same direction as the player to maximize Vulcan damage or, in the case of the Cannon or Rocket, target and fire independently in a different direction to destroy the highest-priority target. How the player uses all these weapons in unison will often determine how long or difficult a stage or boss battle will be.
Of course, there’s also a “twist”—literally. While each player’s helicopter can move in eight directions, its nose can only rotate within a 45-degree cone on the horizontal axis, meaning the player is incapable of turning toward and shooting at anything outside that cone of vision. Therefore, they cannot hit any target directly to the right, left or anywhere behind unless they maneuver their heli below or behind the target.
“It’s bizarre to me as a seasoned gamer to feel so much nostalgia for a game I’ve never played or even known anything about.”
What’s even more hardcore is that moving left or right on the left analog stick (LS) automatically rotates the nose in those directions, while holding down the fire button locks the nose position in place while shooting. In other words, players must manipulate the body of the aircraft simply to aim and shoot, in addition to dodging bullets. Thankfully, there’s a dual analog stick option available that assigns LS to firing and RS to movement, which feels snappier and far more precise.
These simplistic yet rigid old-school arcade elements all contribute to a challenging, white-knuckle gameplay experience that will definitely set players’ heart rates spiking as they attempt to weave through bursts of enemy bullet patterns, salvos of guided missiles and other unorthodox weaponry. Under Defeat is not quite a “bullet-hell” shooter in the traditional Toaplan sense; it doesn’t assail players with constant, hypnotizing waves of bullets to intricately navigate. Instead, it forces them to juggle quick evasion techniques with switching power-ups and exercising strategic use of the Smart Bomb to cheat death, conserve lives and extend their onslaught on the enemy for as long as possible.
On Easy difficulty, players are only equipped with a stock of five lives (no extras), and five continues, so they’ll need to put in plenty of practice to “git gud” and stretch out those 25 lives to reach and eventually defeat the final boss. And they’ll need to perform even better if they intend to finish the game on Normal or Hard difficulty with the game’s default of just three lives per continue.
Thankfully, Under Defeat honours the bullet-hell tradition of the “hitbox,” where only a small area of the player’s aircraft—in this case, the cockpit—is actually vulnerable to enemy fire or collisions. Once players learn to keep track of where their cockpit is amidst the rain of bullets, they can fearlessly swerve their chopper’s tail into oncoming fire without dying (mostly), thread the needle through slower-moving clusters of bullets with confidence and lean far less on bombs to reach the end of a stage.
Having said that, never underestimate the lethality of this game’s trademark orange bullets, as the multitude of tanks, enemy choppers and other foes that fire them are all gunning to kill you with impunity. Bullets will intentionally curve and arc their way toward you at the worst possible times. They’ll deliver a cheap, no-warning death from under a canopy of trees or a rolling smoke cloud, or they’ll explode like a firework into a death blossom of smaller shells that can travel at various velocities. At certain points during a stage or boss battle, resorting to a bomb is the only way to avoid losing a life to a hail of bullets—full stop. It feels a bit unfair, but in the end, it’s all part of Under Defeat’s design.
On the bright side, Under Defeat features a Practice Mode that allows players to play through any unlocked stage on any difficulty, making it easier for them to learn enemy patterns and weaknesses until they’ve got them down to a science. It also packs in a good number of extras that serious shmup fans will appreciate, such as the ability to play the game in a brand-new 16:9 fullscreen mode called New Order Mode, which allows the game to fill and make use of the entire HDTV screen rather than having letterboxing on the sides. Of course, if you prefer to play Arcade Mode with letterboxing, you still can, and if your monitor supports vertical rotation, Under Defeat can be played in TATE mode to simulate playing on a tall arcade cabinet.
“If you’re a shmup fan, I can’t recommend picking up a copy of Under Defeat enough.”
To my delight, Under Defeat now features four selectable BGM soundtracks: Original, Arranged, New Order and Boosted. The first was composed by legendary composer Shinji Hosoe (of Tekken and Ridge Racer fame) in 2005. New Order is the 2011 soundtrack from Under Defeat HD, featuring my favourite song, Go On a Mission/Towards a Mistake, by Hosoe and Yousuke Yasui, while Boosted is an all-new, rave-tastic take on the soundtrack by Hosoe and his studio, Super Sweep. This trio of themes goes off in completely different directions, and I personally love all of them. It’s just a shame that a jukebox or sound test mode wasn’t included so that the music tracks could be enjoyed without having to play through the stages they are tied to.
With only five biome-themed stages in its campaign, Under Defeat is an unabashedly short game, which, by the way, is fairly common for most arcade shoot-’em-ups. A single playthrough can be completed in just over 20 minutes, but it’s the journey of playing and replaying the stages, honing one’s reflexes and eventually attaining the level of mastery required to beat the game in the first place where the replay value truly lies. It also helps that this game never gets old to look at or listen to, regardless of how many times my attack chopper lays the fictional Union armies to waste all across Western Europe. Finally, New Order Mode and Arcade Mode offer unlockable Plus and Extra modes, respectively, for completionists.
If you’re a shmup fan, I can’t recommend picking up a copy of Under Defeat enough. And if you’re a PlayStation or Switch owner, do the collector in you a favour and pick up a physical copy if possible, as it rightfully deserves a place on your gaming shelf.
