![gals panic 4 gals panic 4](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qei8CbRmlM8/XROFQklv08I/AAAAAAAAM7s/9E0ctXswGqE7CIarnmtWswh63Fgr9IMxwCLcBGAs/s1600/Gals%2BPanic%2C%2Barcade%2Ber%C3%B3tico%2Bjapon%C3%A9s.jpg)
There's not a lot of meat to Pretty Girls Panic! The 14 characters have between three and five stages each, and that flies by pretty quickly, though the difficulty curve is steady and the more extreme levels will test your classic arcade ability. Qix is also a game where you will sometimes need to draw tiny boxes, and that's difficult when the icon is hiding the lines underneath them. More than a few times I'd accidentally inched forwards without realising it, only to have an enemy crash into me and knock me out. Because it's an octopus icon, and quite big, it's hard to tell when you've started drawing a box sometimes. The only issue with the game, mechanically, is the size of the icon of your own character. Each of the enemy types follow prescribed behaviours and are very fair (many Qix games have enemies that move completely randomly, which can be infuriating to deal with). The game plays like a very standard version of Qix, with a couple of different enemy types and the occasional power-up, all of which do make it substantially easier to complete levels, so their presence in the game is meaningful. By that, I mean there are some provocative "camera angles", and rather revealing clothing, but no actual "naughty bits" exposed. It's art like you'd see in a calendar that a brazen person might display in the lounge room without needing to worry about being called an out-and-out pervert should a guest arrive. In comparison to that series, Pretty Girls Panic! aims for the classy route, eschewing nudity for a sexy pin-up aesthetic. Now, Gals Panic was pretty erotic, with nudity and everything (for those that didn't live in markets that censored this stuff). Naturally, you want to reveal the girl, but since she's in the middle of the playfield you generally need to take some risks to do that, because those enemies are bounding around and the middle of the playfield is where things get most dangerous.
![gals panic 4 gals panic 4](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DpmlcHOaWug/hqdefault.jpg)
In Gals Panic and Pretty Girls Panic!, after you draw a box, whatever was silhouetted underneath is revealed. In regular Qix you're just drawing boxes. In Qix, the goal of the game is to uncover 70 per cent or so of the playfield by drawing "boxes," while avoiding enemies as you do so. In those games, the main "hook" was that by playing well you'd get to reveal the silhouette of a character that, at the start of the level, was completely hidden.
GALS PANIC 4 SERIES
The game is a homage to Gals Panic, a series of super-lewd arcade games in the 90's. On the other hand, Pretty Girls Panic! is super-cheap for 14 sets of lovely ladies to Qix your way through and so, without further ado, here's the adapted review of the last time that Zoo Corporation brought this kind of action to our Switches: The art still is well-designed and certainly fanservicey enough (there's no nudity but the swimsuits are daring), but it's hard to get past the poor presentation of the game's hero feature. Given that the art is a key reason to play this, that's a significant detriment to the game. On the downside, the character art is also copy/pasted from visual novels (from quite a few years ago now) and therefore looks quite fuzzy and low resolution on the Switch. These swimsuits and the like are so much more pleasant than the military stuff, so that's a plus. Pretty Girls Panic! is so similar to Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic that I'll copy and paste the review across, but there are a couple of minor differences that are worth noting firstly, rather than girls with guns and dressed up in military uniforms, Pretty Girls Panic! instead has a more tropical vibe and instead focuses, for the most part, on swimwear and other such summery wear. It is, basically, Qix, but rather than clearing blank or generic backgrounds, you're instead revealing pictures of pretty girls. Pretty Girls Panic! by Zoo Corporation is basically the same game as Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic!, a previous title that it (via publisher EastAsiaSoft) has already released on the Nintendo Switch.