REVIEW: Sisters Royale: Five Sisters Under Fire


Title	Sisters Royale: Five Sisters Under Fire
Developer	AlfaSystem
Publisher	Chorus Worldwide Games
Release Date	January 30th, 2020
Genre	Shmup
Platform	Switch
Age Rating	Teen
Official Website

I’ve been on a kick of reviewing Shmups here lately, so when I got a chance to check out Sisters Royale: Five Sisters Under Fire I decided to jump on it. This one is developed by Alfa System, the team that brought you Castle of Shikigami III from the Castle of Shikigami series, so I had pretty high expectations for this one. Let’s see if it lived up to them.

The story follows five sisters that all want to marry the angel, Yashin. They all have a very unique approach of obtaining this goal, but there is one thing in common for each of them: they must defeat all their sisters in combat to gain their man! The dialogue exchanges between the sisters are hilarious. Each girl’s personality really shines through in the writing here. Lale is the kind of happy-go-lucky girl that just wants to get married. Ece wants to get married to prove her justice. Selma is the most uppity of the sisters. She gets under the other skins really quickly! Sonay is a bit of sadist and Nur wants to show what she has learned in her travels. I had a lot of laughs and a great time going through this with each of the sisters.

Graphically Sisters Royale: Five Sisters Under Fire looks great. The five stages each have a unique look from frozen wastelands to haunted temples. The environments not only look nice but do have an effect on the gameplay. Players have to light lanterns in the temple to improve visibility and you will slide when walking across ice in the wasteland. Player and enemy models have that 2.5D look about them with a good amount of detail. There are plenty of flashy bomb effects and bullets to give you some more eye candy as well.

Not really much to say in the sound department. The game has a great soundtrack. This is a must for any good Shmup and Sisters Royale: Five Sisters Under Fire delivers. Each stage has a great beat to blow up everything in your path to and the sound effects fit all the attacks perfectly. The cut scenes are not voiced in any way but that doesn’t really take anything away from the experience.

Now we look at the most important aspect of any Shmup, the gameplay. I am very happy to say that Sisters Royale: Five Sisters Under Fire is not only one of the funniest games in the genre I’ve played in a long time, its also one of the most customizeable. You can change the difficulty, bullet size, bullet speed and the game can even be flipped vertically if you have a stand for your Switch. The bosses will gain extra phases for you to dodge your way through on higher difficulties, and some of these will challenge even veteran players.

You may be saying – that’s great and all, but there are only five stages, so the game is too short. That is a very true, but all this customization adds a ton of replay value. You can use as many continues as you like, but your score will suffer every time you do this. This gives you a good incentive to get better, so you can earn a fantastic score and get on the leaderboards. This makes this game have a ton of replay value at the very reasonable price of $13.99.

At the end of the day I feel like Sisters Royale: Five Sisters Under Fire is well worth your coin. It’s a fun and customizable Shmup that anyone can pick and play and that vets will be able to challenge themselves with as well. The story is pretty insane at times, but I had a blast with it. The music is really good and there were no technical problems here that I could find. If you’ve ever had a passing interest in this genre, do yourself a favor and pick up this gem.