Score Rush Extended: Porting an Award-Winning Bullet Hell to PS4

Score Rush Extended, an award-winning bullet hell shooter by Xona Games, ported to PS4 by Sickhead Games

Title: Score Rush Extended
Release Date: 2016
Developer: Xona Games
Publisher: Xona Games / Reverb Publishing
Platforms: PlayStation 4
Engine: Duality Engine (proprietary)

Score Rush Extended is a four-player bullet-hell twin-stick shooter from Canadian indie studio Xona Games, the world’s first widescreen bullet-hell shmup, with multidirectional dual-stick controls. Score Rush began as an indie game for Xbox 360 in 2010, where it built a serious cult following, becoming the #1 game in Japan on Xbox LIVE Indie Games. The PS4 version wasn’t just a straight port, it was a substantial expansion. Xona Games added new features including multiple difficulty settings, a Boss Rush mode, a Dual Play mechanic letting one player control two ships simultaneously, and DualShock 4 speaker integration that routes per-player audio cues directly to each controller. Sickhead handled the PS4 port, which meant bringing a proprietary engine (Xona’s own award-winning Duality Engine) through Sony’s certification pipeline cleanly. Bullet-hell games are among the most performance-sensitive genres in existence: the screen can be filled with hundreds of simultaneous projectiles, each with active hitboxes, while up to four local players are all firing at once. Maintaining a locked 60fps under that load isn’t a given, it’s an engineering problem. Getting all of that running stably on PS4 hardware, passing cert, and shipping on schedule is exactly the kind of high-precision work that we specializes in.


Sickhead Games is the leading game porting studio, bringing Unity, Unreal, Godot, and custom engine titles to console and handheld including PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Android, and iOS. From codebase assessment to post-launch support, we're trusted by solo indies and major publishers alike, including Humble Games, Sony Interactive, Nintendo, Annapurna, Good Games, ConcernedApe, MegaCrit, 17-Bit, Maddy Makes Games, Zachtronics, Keen Software House, Thomas Happ, Pocketwatch Games, EXOK, Young Horses, Taito, Jaleco, and Microsoft. We've shipped over 100 releases, among them Stardew Valley, Slay the Spire, Axiom Verge, Space Engineers, and Celeste. We specialize in bringing retro masterpieces, indie darlings, and PC classics to modern audiences like Grandia, Enclave, and Jaleco Sports titles.