This is another of the "first in a series" Psikyo arcade shooter from the early 1990s, in this case the prequel to the popular arcade & mobile hit "Tengai". It's a standard bullet hell shooter with a bit of a samurai theme in the characters, an odd crowd with some slightly wacky special attacks depending on who you pick.
Like most of the other Psikyo series openers the game itself is meh and not much to write home about, and the difficulty level is unusually high. But I give it a thumbs up anyway because, like with all their other games here so far, the developers have done an excellent job with the quality of the port-it's arcade-perfect with the additions of extra difficulty levels, a "Score Attack" mode with online leaderboards and some nice graphical options.
If you're not a Psikyo fan/collector you can easily pass on this one and just go with Tengai (which just hit Steam the day this review was posted) or the Strikers 1945 & Gunbird series, but if you are a fan/collector then despite this being a mediocre game overall it's worth buying to add to your collection and also to support the developer & publisher in helping them to hopefully bring more of these games to Steam. They have done a great job so far and despite very minor flaws the ports are virtually arcade-perfect.

Compared to Gunbird, Samurai Aces is much more difficult. It's not Raiden difficult, however. The difficulty lies primarily in the ships being too slow and the bullets being too fast. You'll get up to speed if you keep at it, though. I didn't care for Samurai Aces much at first; but the longer I played, the more I enjoyed it. I love the 80's/90's drawings, sprites, strong ancient Japanese themes, and wacky humor, which doesn't go over the top (unlike Gunbird). This game really takes me back. (I never played Samurai Aces previously, by the way.)

The developers have done a great job, as usual, including the option to tune the level, lives, and continues to your level of skill. I warn you - even the easiest setting is difficult. Keep playing and you'll find a very enjoyable shooter experience.

Summary Rating: 8

City connection are knocking it out of the park with their arcade to console conversions and Samurai Aces is another well done arcade to PC/steam example.

Game plays, sounds and looks as good as I could want on a 65" TV.

As far as I can tell this is the arcade experience but without needing a 200kg cabinet and the space to put it somewhere.

Thoroughly recommended to fans of arcade shoot'emups and game collectors.

Samurai Aces (AKA Sengoku Ace) was Psikyo's first shooting game and set the format they would stick with for the rest of their releases. It features a cast of playable characters with unique abilities, a randomly-selected stage order, short stages with multi-phase boss battles, and a punishingly-difficult second loop that can be accessed by clearing the game on one credit. Psikyo stuck with this formula and gradually tweaked it for later releases including the Strikers series, Gunbird 1 and 2, and Dragon Blaze, but this is its point of origin.

Even though I'm a long-time fan of shooting games I hadn't played any Psikyo releases until I noticed these ports by City Connection here on Steam. I picked up several of them on sale, but Samurai Aces was the first one I was able to clear consistently and get all the achievements on. It's definitely simpler and more accessible than Psikyo's later games but still provides a decent challenge. This isn't a Cave-style bullet hell like DoDonPachi or Mushihimesama: the bullets are fewer, faster, and more deliberate. Each one has a purpose, whether it's aimed right at you or meant to corral you to a certain part of the screen. Be careful, though: the characters' hitboxes are larger than in more recent games and dodging within bullet patterns is a good way to lose a life. One minor issue I had is that the game doesn't do a good job explaining how to use the charge attacks: when you hold down the shot button, there's no indication that your character is charging anything up until the attack is ready to go, which may take several seconds for characters with long charge times. During this time you can't fire without cancelling the charge attack, so you have to balance the offensive impact of these attacks with time spent waiting for them to charge up.

The port itself is functional and doesn't have any glaring technical flaws but is missing some features found in comparable releases. For example, there is only one leaderboard and it only tracks scores played on the default settings (normal difficulty, 3 lives, no continues). It would have been nice to have leaderboards for other difficulty levels. Also absent is any sort of practice mode. This makes it difficult to practice a specific stage, especially in the second loop, since you need to clear the first loop each time you want to attempt it. Even then, there's no guarantee you'll get the stage you want: each time you play, the game randomly selects the first three stages from a set of four. If the stage you wanted to practice is left out, tough luck!

The role of luck makes Samurai Aces difficult to play for score. In order to compete with the top scores, beyond not dying or bombing throughout both loops, you need to have a run that:

-Gets the city stage as one of the first three stages on both loops
-Gets at least two bombs, preferably more, randomly dropped from the houses at the end of the city stage both times
-Fights the left-hand boss at the end of the sky stage both times (50% chance each loop)
-Gets the demon instead of the tanuki as the final boss both times

Even so, Aces was a good first attempt at making a shooting game and it still plays well today. Its basic formula was refined in later games like the Strikers series and Gunbird and all the way up to Psikyo's final shooting game, Dragon Blaze. It's a good point of entry to players new to Psikyo games, but those with absolutely no shooting game experience might want to ease into the genre with something more polished and accessible.

Compared to other Psikyo shooters I've played, Samurai Aces isn't quite as impressive, but it's still interesting enough to warrant a recommendation in my opinion.

Positives:
- The playable characters are unique and have fun and humorous stories to play through. Most of their endings are silly and basically serve as cheesy punchlines (which I prefer to stories that take themselves too seriously).
- The characters play differently too, with different weapons of course, but also different speeds, bombs (some of which can save you instantly from being hit, while others have a delayed reaction during which you are still vulnerable), and charge attacks.
- The bosses are varied and well-designed, including some that are huge with destructible parts. A team of robot ninjas make repeat appearances, giving a sense of cohesion to the flow between stages.

Negatives
- This is way harder than the other Psikyo games I've played so far. Even in Monkey Mode (the easiest difficulty) I had to increase my life count to be able to get through the game. Now, I'm FAR from an expert in these games, but the difficulty seemed to stem from the following two issues:
- When you get game over, you need to re-start from the beginning of the stage you were in.
- Your power-ups will not drift to the bottom of the screen. They'll bounce off the bottom third of the screen, forcing you to move up and in harm's way to collect them. This is especially frustrating during boss fights, where it's exceptionally difficult to get close enough to pick up a power-up without also getting exploded by the boss's projectiles. And since they drift off-screen after a limited amount of time, I found myself having to make do with an underpowered weapon where I most needed extra firepower.
- The charge attack is not particularly useful since most of them seem to take an obscenely long time to charge up. I basically only used them to hit bosses just a bit harder when they first appear, and not at all other than that because it wasn't worth the high risk of leaving myself vulnerable.
- The levels themselves, while serviceable, are not terribly unique or interesting.

Despite its flaws, I enjoyed the fun characters and the simple pleasure of shooting everything in my path. Recommended for Psikyo completionists, particularly when it goes on sale (I picked it up at a heavy discount).