COTTON REBOOT!

If you’ve never heard of Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams, that’s no reason to ignore Cotton Reboot! You need not be a retro gamer to appreciate this shoot ’em up’s excellent arcade/action gameplay, you just need to be a fan of cute, upbeat fun.

Cotton Reboot is the way to do a remake. It’s a bold reimagining of a cult classic, one that remains authentic to the cheeky, playful energy of the original game, but isn’t afraid to rework it to a significant degree and introduce an inventive new scoring system, creating an exciting new shmup outing in the process. But by including the original game, faithfully preserved and presented on equal footing, the remake never tries to replace the original. They’re different sides of the same coin, each serving a different purpose but providing the perfect complement to one another—and also laying the groundwork for when Cotton Rock ‘n’ Roll: Superlative Night Dreams lands later this year.

I absolutely loved this game, it’s not just a great remake of a great shooter, but it’s genuinely one of the best shooters that I’ve played on a current-gen system. Beep has done a great job in making the series feel both fresh and nostalgic at the same time. It’s still a very short game, but if you like a good shooter and you’ll get replay value from chasing a high score then you absolutely must get this.