Super Psycho Cycle – your personal bullet hell on two wheels

Although the phrase “Bullet Hell” is usually associated with arcade games involving overpowered planes shooting their way through, this time it’s all about couple of drunken hogs trying to accomplish god knows what while riding their bikes on the highway and blasting to pieces everything that comes by. This is Super Psycho Cycle by Shiny Box.

And the story goes like this. One of the gang members rushes towards the bar and informs the boss that “they” got his girl and asks if he plans to do something about it. T-Dawg (the boss, obviously drunk) responds “No. Now we kill”.  Classy.

As already mentioned, Super Psycho Cycle is a retro bullet hell vertical shooter. A concept well known since the beginning of the video game industry with only one exception, instead the usual airplanes, you will play as one of the hogs riding their bikes and killing everything that moves. The enemies consist of jeeps, buggies, oversize tanks, helicopters and pretty much anything that can shoot back. Right from the start only one of the bikes is available to play with – the pretty basic “Tombstone”. In order to effectively clear the way and dodge the bullets, you will have to unlock the other two bikes as well, the”Spitfire” and the most powerful “Cerberus” that can be purchased by spending some coins. Each game will provide certain amount of coins based on your performance and the multiplier that keeps going up as long as you successfully kill enemies and avoid bullets. The “Nitro” bar fills up gradually, when fully charged it will shield you from one projectile, otherwise the bullets you receive will lower your score and reset the multiplier.

Super Psycho Cycle is free to download and play and apart from luring you to buy more coins, the game also features some pretty obnoxious ads. The bottom ad that doesn’t go away during the entire gameplay is not that bad and won’t bother you too much. However the other type of ad that randomly pops up, pausing the game and interrupting the gameplay is really something that most of the players will find hard to ignore. Unfortunately it seems that there is no way to remove the ads at this moment. Furthermore, the developers forgot to mention how many coins will you receive when you tap the button and decide to spend $0.99

Winners don’t use drugs, they get drunk on moonshine instead

One other thing I found quite amusing was the “Winners don’t use drugs” slogan that pops up soon after you start the game. This was part of the anti-drug campaign that took place between 1989 – 2000 and all import games in North America had it included showing it right before the title or during the demo mode. Quite odd to see it now in game that doesn’t even have region restrictions, but I guess it will do more good then bad anyway. If you feel like trying Super Psycho Cycle, you can download it from the link below. The game will occupy about 14 mb of storage and should be running smoothly on older devices as well.

UPDATE: Game was removed from Google Play. All copies vanished. If you have one, drop a comment for historic preservation.