Three shoot’em ups, three ways to play

The same genre does not mean the same game

A shooter is quick to sum up: enemies come, you shoot, you dodge. That summary is accurate for all three titles compared here, and it tells you nothing useful — because the question that matters is not “what do you do?” but “what kills you?”. And these three games answer differently.

In one sentence each, here is the problem the game sets you:

• Néon Assault — a city to protect: its health bar is twelve buildings, and a share of the enemy shots aims straight at the city, wherever your battery is.
• Néon Front — a five-mission campaign seen from above, where six enemy types stack up, each with its own way of killing you, and where the weapon you carry is built up from mission to mission.
• Néon Starship — a weapon you build and protect: every hit costs a weapon level (never the weapon itself) before it costs a life, and no hiding place holds.

Those three problems are not solved with the same reflexes. That is why being good at one of the three does not automatically make you good at the other two, and why all three can live in the catalogue without overlapping.

Axis 1 — What your hands do

Movement is the most immediate difference, and it is often what decides whether you like a game within ten seconds.

• Néon Assault confines you to a single axis: your battery goes left and right on its rail at the foot of the city, and that is all. Fire happens on its own. The decision stays single — where to sit on that line — but it is no longer “under the enemies”: to intercept a shot aimed at a building or to step out of a lightning bolt, you often have to leave the jellyfish’s vertical.
• Néon Starship adds the vertical: you move in all four directions inside a horizontal playfield while the scenery scrolls past. Fire is automatic here too, but you have three actions to manage: the beam (Space), the Force (Shift or F) and the bomb (B). On touch, you slide a thumb anywhere on the screen and the fighter follows your gesture without passing under your finger; three buttons fire the beam, switch the Force and drop the bomb.
• Néon Front separates your two hands entirely: one control moves your soldier, the other picks the direction you shoot in — and the two are completely independent. You can back away while firing forwards. On a keyboard, W A S D or the arrow keys move and the mouse aims; on touch, one stick per thumb, plus a grenade button.

That last arrangement, known as “twin-stick”, is the hardest of the three to pick up: aiming and moving become two independent problems, which is disorienting at first and very satisfying afterwards. Movement on a single axis, by contrast, needs no explanation at all.

Axis 2 — Where the danger comes from

The direction the threat comes from completely changes the way you read the screen. In Néon Assault, the threat comes first from the top: a formation of jellyfish sliding sideways and dropping a notch every time it touches an edge, up to seven columns by five rows, thirty-five enemies. But the danger does not stop there: a growing share of its shots is aimed at a lit building, a new enemy arrives every night (armoured, splitting, kamikaze, ink, lightning) and five three-phase bosses fire barrages, always announced before they strike.

In Néon Front it comes from everywhere — the top and both sides — and above all it is not uniform. Six enemy types take turns, and each kills you differently. One rule ties them together: every attack is preceded by a visible warning of at least 0.45 seconds, and its direction is locked before the shot, so a player who reacts can step aside.

Their behaviour and what they are worth, which explain the order to deal with them in:

• Grunt — walks at you and hurts on contact: 30 points.
• Rusher — flashes while locking its direction, then charges in a straight line: 45 points.
• Gunner — keeps its distance, traces an aiming laser that locks, then fires: 60 points.
• Turret — immobile, it fires a burst of three shots in the locked direction: 150 points.
• Tank — slow and very tough, it fires a fan of three after a long warning: 200 points.
• Officer — marked, it keeps its distance, fires a fan and calls for reinforcements: 400 points.

Those enemies are not all there from the start: every mission scripts its groups sector by sector, and changes objective — reach the extraction point, destroy turrets, free hostages, hold a position, take out officers. Stand still and the artillery spots you: after 4 seconds within a radius of 80 pixels, it shells your position. Néon Assault proceeds by nights that each add an enemy. Néon Starship, for its part, brings its enemies from one side — the right — but adds indestructible obstacles and a trap of its own to every organ: walls that squeeze, a gust that pushes you, drops of acid, arteries that swell. Its rule against hiding is similar: after 5 seconds within a radius of 90 pixels, the creature spots you and every enemy aims at you. Some elements cannot be destroyed, only avoided.

Axis 3 — Tempo

The basic fire rates are close, and that is exactly what makes the comparison interesting: 280 milliseconds between basic shots in Néon Assault, 260 in Néon Starship, 200 for the starting rifle of Néon Front — between three and a half and five shots a second. The difference in feel does not come from there.

It comes from structure. Néon Assault advances by nights: four waves, a boss, then the dawn where you pick an upgrade before starting again. Néon Front advances by missions: each has three sectors, two of combat or objective then the boss sector, which you leave by clearing the sector and reaching the exit to the north. And its tempo depends on the weapon you carry: each has its own rate, from 85 milliseconds for the level-3 machine gun to 850 for the level-1 rockets. Néon Starship runs on organs: from 70 to 105 groups of enemies to get through depending on the organ, then a boss.

Axis 4 — Three difficulty engines

This is where the three designs part company most sharply, because they do not raise the pressure with the same lever.

Néon Assault keeps an almost cruel mechanism: the formation speeds up by 1.8 pixels per second for every jellyfish destroyed. Emptying a formation of thirty-five jellyfish therefore adds over 61 pixels per second of sideways speed to the last survivors. The end of every wave is mechanically tenser than its start, and it is your own success that produces that tension. The underlying climb now comes from the nights: the formation’s starting speed goes from 95 pixels per second on the first wave of the first night to 250 on the last wave of the fifth, and its fire interval from 1,648 to 1,059 milliseconds.

Néon Front climbs mission after mission. With each mission, a difficulty level raises the enemies’ toughness, speed, fire rate and bullet speed, and the number of enemies per group, and shortens the warning before a shot — without ever letting it fall under 0.45 seconds. The first campaign is deliberately softened; the next one takes the full curve. The level stops climbing at the fourteenth, reached on the last mission of the third campaign, but points keep multiplying by the campaign’s rank, and winning a campaign pays a bonus of 80,000 points. As for bosses, there is one per mission: the Boar, the Gunboat, the Warlord, the Stone Guardian, then the Colonel.

Néon Starship does neither: it changes creature. Every creature defeated opens a tougher one, where enemies have 30% more hit points, bosses 35% and traps are 20% more intense, while points are multiplied by the creature’s rank, up to rank 6. And its bosses do not repeat: one per organ, from the throat’s Larynx, on 150 hit points and firing a fan, to the heart’s Ventricle, on 230 hit points and firing curtains with a gap to find.

Néon Assault has bosses too, but built differently: one per night, from the Mother of the first night, on 32 hit points, to the Moon Jelly of the fifth, on 92. Each moves through three increasingly aggressive phases, each announced by a charge before the barrage, and has an attack of its own: a brood of larvae, armoured guards, tentacles sweeping the coast, ink that hides the battery.

Two of the three games have a weapon you build up, with the same underlying idea: the difficulty climbs, the weapon has to climb with you, and every hit takes a level off it. In Néon Front, each weapon remembers its level, switching weapons costs one, and a hit costs one too: at level 1 you drop back to the basic rifle, and only then does a hit cost a life. In Néon Starship, a hit costs one level, never two, and never the weapon itself: at level 1 it stays at level 1, and it is the life that pays. In both, the crates or capsules of the weapon you carry drop more often: you build your weapon, you do not just put up with it.

Which one is for you

All three are free to play with no account, so nothing stops you trying them all. But if you want to go straight to the right one, start from what you enjoy doing.

• You like a short campaign where every decision counts — Néon Assault: a city to save in five nights, an upgrade to pick every dawn, a single axis of movement.
• You like overload and juggling several dangers at once — Néon Front: it is the only one of the three where you aim and move independently, and the one that stacks six enemy behaviours over five missions.
• You would rather build and protect an arsenal — Néon Starship: four weapons on three levels, a shield, drones, a bomb, and the question there is never “can I shoot?” but “what should I keep for the boss?”.

One thing they do share, and it is reassuring: all of them protect you after a hit. Néon Starship and Néon Front give you 3 lives and a brief flashing invincibility after every hit taken, so you do not lose two lives to the same mistake; Néon Assault has no lives, the city takes the damage, and a hit battery is protected for 0.9 seconds. The rest — your hands, how you read the screen, what puts you under pressure — belongs to each game.