A fine, forgettable shooter that's been elevated to cult status by being extremely rare (and by the fact that the company that made it never did anything else).

It's got some cool visuals, and some chunky, uniquely-Genesis tunes, but nothing I'd trip over myself recommending. Gameplay ranges from moderately appealing to downright unpleasant (looking at you, slow, trap-laden R-Typey levels); and my least favorite thing, so seemingly-small but so ridiculously impactful on the experience, is how the weapon switching feels laggy instead of instantaneous like it should (like it does in, say, Alien Soldier).

Not too into this one. It's basically R-Type on crack, usually (if not always) to its detriment. Most notably, it somehow amplifies the difficulty and memorization elements even further, leaving behind a borderline barbaric end result. Stage 7 is probably the stupidest, most unfair level I've played in a shmup thus far. Not helping much is the length, being several stages too many while each one progressively gets longer to begin with. Also similar to R-Type is the visuals and presentation, though it's nothing that the former doesn't do better anyway.

I really don't like the weapon switching either. It reminds me of Hellfire, which was very bad about this in essentially the same way (talked about in more detail here https://www.backloggd.com/u/Jenny/review/456097/).

Overall I'm left kinda disappointed. It's not necessarily bad by any means but it made me wish I was playing various other shmups more to my liking, and I just wanted it to be over even when I was only a little past the halfway point.

HORIZONTAL GENESIS SHOOTERS - they have a certain ebb and flow that makes them distinguishable from a glance: Distinctly-electrifying art direction, overdriven metal music, high physical speeds juxtaposed by simple enemy patterns, and loads of weapons with varying feels and uses. But they're not everyone's brand: They often feel sorely under-playtested and lack a hook that justifies 1CC-chasing them. Often too easy (Daiginjou, TFIII), too memorization-heavy (TFIV), inconsistent in difficulty curves (Gynoug, Crying) or flat-out barren (Gleylancer).

Eliminate Down is weird because even though it's very loudly 'Genesis', it feels very dissimilar to Genesis shmups in execution - more like a kusoge you'd find in the deep canals of MAME. It's as arcadey as it gets - R-Type-style Geiger art, tightly-packed levels with equal bounds of setpieces and intense enemy encounters, and rhythmless music that exists not to be listenable but to give the action a volatile backbeat. It's very fully-realized in a way that feels almost too good for a Genesis game - not to say others suck, but there's an air of professional completeness here that even the MD greats often lack. Every level has so much crammed into it and nothing ever strikes anticlimax.

It's also hard - WAY too hard, borderline unbeatably sinister. Cramped corridors and complex enemy anatomy makes the solution to each encounter deceptively difficult, having to make time to attack narrow weakpoints while avoiding near-screenclearing sweeps. A single hit drops your weapon level, with power-ups dropping in scarce clusters only a few times instead of being evenly dispersed across the map. Bosses assault you with multi-layered barrages that nary give you a safezone to chicken out towards. And sometimes, the game just likes to be evil and trap you in an unwinnable situation; stage 5 comes to mind, throwing a section with ground-crawling robots that will leave you crushed by an impassible barricade if you don't know in advance to position yourself on the other side of the object a full 20 seconds before you're expected to. It's not a very Gradius-like game, but some of the ways it becomes bullshit are very Gradius-core, and that's why I don't like it as much as some other Genesis shooters. It's so functionally-focused, often to the detriment of player feel and a comfortable flow.