Considering how often the phrase has been hideously abused lately, Ifrit really can be described as “retro themed”; the player has only three bullets in play at any one time and there are no power-ups, secondary weapons or smart bombs to be had and each of the three horizontally-scrolling stages should take around a minute to play through including the boss fight. At that point the game offers it’s congratulions before entering the second loop, unexpectedly playing it’s ace because, along with a drastic increase in the number of bullets being thrown into play, it introduces a fourth enemy, the first boss becomes incredibly trigger happy, the second gains a twin and so on!
At the risk of sounding hideously pretentious and arty, Ifrit is shoot ‘em up minimalism where the complexities that have been added to the genre over the decades are stripped away whilst the visceral playability is maintained. Oh dear, that was an abject failure to sound unpretentious on my part but what I’m trying to do is actively avoid using the word “simple” at this point because I don’t believe that’d be doing any kind of justice to this game; the in-level enemy deployment may well be randomised and almost every enemy shot fired is aimed, but the fixed movement rules for each type of nasty means they can be learnt and a single shot from the player kills everything bar the bosses.
It’s never going to win awards for originality or depth and probably sets the art game crowd’s collective teeth on edge, but that’s probably the reason I like Ifrit so much; it’s a spot of straightforward, totally unabashed blasting that looks and indeed sounds 16-bit whilst playing like an 8-bit game, making the player rely almost exclusively on their reactions rather than having to commit the level layouts to memory as would normally be the case for a horizontal shooter. Whilst a few people have bemoaned the lack of extra weaponry, commented on the unusual collision system (the player ship and enemy bullets are destroyed by the background detail, but enemies and player bullets sail through unharmed) and I suspect that any serious shoot ‘em up players will find themselves lamenting the lack of a scoring system that goes beyond “shoot stuff, get points”, these aren’t really necessities for an enjoyable example of the genre.
Basically, as long as there are enough bullets being fired to get the job done and there are points racking up for blowing the little feckers to kingdom come I’ll be entertained for ages and Ifrit therefore makes me a happy bunny.