The PS4 Was Quietly a Great Shoot-'Em-Up Console

When I sorted my PS4 collection by genre, one number jumped out. Out of roughly 157 games, 41 are vertical shooters, 17 are horizontal shooters, and 10 more are twin-stick shooters. That's more than a third of the shelf.

The PS4 is remembered for big, cinematic exclusives. It deserves to be remembered for this too. Between careful arcade reissues and a wave of indie shooters, it ended up with one of the best shoot-'em-up libraries of any home console.

The arcade reissues

This is the heart of it. Publishers like M2, City Connection and Hamster spent the PS4 years putting classic arcade shooters on a home console, often with extras the originals never had.

Game	What it is
Ikaruga	Treasure's polarity-switching masterpiece, where absorbing bullets of your own color is the whole game
Battle Garegga Rev.2016	The notoriously strange Raizing shooter, finally on a PlayStation
Ketsui Deathtiny	Cave's hard, gorgeous shooter, with M2's arrange modes
Deathsmiles I & II	Cave's gothic horizontal shooters
Akai Katana Shin and Dangun Feveron	More Cave, from the bullet-hell heavyweights
Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours and Darius Cozmic Collection	Taito's wide-screen fish-themed shooters
G-Darius HD	Darius in polygons
Raiden III x MIKADO MANIAX and Raiden V: Director's Cut	The Raiden line, still going
Sol Cresta, Rainbow Cotton, Cotton Reboot!	Newer revivals of old series

And then the Arcade Archives and ACA NeoGeo line, which put single classic arcade games on the store for a few dollars each: Gradius, Blazing Star, Pulstar, Last Resort, Strikers 1945 Plus and Twinkle Star Sprites are all on my shelf.

The modern ones

The indie side is just as deep:

• Devil Engine: a modern take on the Mega Drive shooters of the early '90s, like Thunder Force.
• Sky Force Anniversary and Sky Force Reloaded: approachable vertical shooters with upgrades, good for anyone who bounces off bullet hell.
• Jamestown+: a shooter set on a British colonial Mars, great in co-op.
• Sine Mora EX, Natsuki Chronicles, Söldner-X 2, Super Hydorah, Sophstar, Graze Counter GM, Ghost Blade HD and a long tail of smaller ones.
• R-Type Final 2, the long-awaited follow-up to the PS2's R-Type Final.

Devil Engine. Screenshot from the PC release's store page.

The twin-stick corner

Ten more games that are shooters in a different shape, where the left stick moves and the right one aims:

Resogun, Nex Machina, Super Stardust Ultra, Matterfall, Alienation, Assault Android Cactus, Enter the Gungeon, Geometry Wars 3, Nuclear Throne and TowerFall Ascension.

The interesting thread here is Housemarque. Resogun was a PS4 launch game, Super Stardust Ultra and Alienation and Matterfall followed, and Nex Machina was made with Eugene Jarvis, the designer of Defender and Robotron. It's a straight line from 1981 arcades to a 2017 PS4 game.

Nex Machina. Screenshot from the PC release's store page.

Tip

A lot of these support vertical "tatetate modeA setting for vertical shooters that rotates the picture, so you can turn the monitor on its side and use the whole screen.More: The Best Arcade-Style Games on PS1, PS2 and PS3, for a Cabinet or a Stick" mode. If you have a monitor that rotates, turning it sideways for the vertical shooters makes a huge difference. The picture uses the whole screen instead of a narrow strip in the middle.

Why it happened

A few things lined up. Digital storefronts made it cheap to release a niche game. Japanese publishers had learned there was a steady audience for careful reissues. And shooters are small, focused games that indie developers could actually finish and ship.

Note

Plenty of these are also on Switch, PC and newer PlayStations now. The PS4 just happened to be where a lot of them landed first, or best.

If this is your genre, the arcade history behind a lot of these is in the golden age of arcades, and the earlier PlayStation generations' shooters are in the PlayStation arcade lists.