I find Psikyo shooters pretty hit or miss with me, and Tengai is one of the misses. This game hits many of the things I don't care for in Psikyo games while also adding a few new elements I also find not very fun.

Tengai is a horizontal shoot 'em up where the player picks a character that flies around shooting enemies with their own brand of shot, charged shot and limited bomb attack. With in stage pick-ups to power up the regular shot from a homing attack with a trailing spear option-style attack. With the more powerful regular shot balanced with more focused area of effect bomb attacks and such. I've never been much of a fan of the Psikyo charge attack, since the screen is usually full of enemies and/or projectiles, and the charge attack can often pull away from screen control or loss of focus. Plus, I can never quite tell how much the game wants me to use the charge attack to be successful.

The thing I like the least with Tengai is the near bullethell attacks that often move at the faster end of more traditional shump projectiles. All the while the player character is pretty slow. Like bullethell focused attack slow. Adding to this is a not easily defined hit box since the player characters a person and a fairly large sprite for a STG. Making the game fairly frustrating to dodge.

Tengai is also one of the Psikyo shmups where I can barely tell the difference between the easiest difficulty and the hardest. Sure, there's a difference but it isn't much. And I've played enough of their Strikers 1945 series to know their games can have a wide margin of easy to hard.

The graphics, music and sound are excellent in Tengai. They're my favorite aspect of the game. I especially like some of the music tracks. But I'm constantly underwhelmed with the actual game to want to play it for very long. Let alone improve and practice playing it.

Tengai is also one of the trickier Psikyo games here on Steam to get a not standard controller (Xbox or PS) setup. I like to either use a Sega Genesis USB or an actual arcade stick. Neither are particularly easy to figure out what the game maps these buttons as. Fortunately, there are few button inputs for this game. So it is easy enough to figure out Shot and Auto Shot and make the rest Bomb.

I'd have to think about it more, but I could see me ranking Tengai as my least favorite Psikyo game here on Steam. It's competing with Strikers 1945 III and Sol Divide of the top of my head. I'm sure all those games have their fans, but I'm certainly not one of them.