It's really refreshing playing through a very "gamey game" nowadays. A game that immediately jumps into the action with zero story and doesn't slow down while being a short 20-40 minute campaign. This also a pretty unique take on the action shooter genre by forcing players to plant their feet on the ground whenever they need to shoot, which while it can come off as clunky at first it also makes positioning the most important thing in this game. It's all about knowing when you can take a shot but also from where, deciding who to prioritize first, is it safe to pick up the items now, it's a very exhilarating gameplay flow. On top of which it's a very pretty pixel game, especially with the enourmous mech boss battles. It is difficult like any arcade game though, especially since you die in one hit and you don't start with many lives, but this actually made earning lives extremely rewarding. I understand why people see lives as outdated, but with the addition a combo system by killing many enemies in a row without letting go of the shoot button and how there's many items that grant extra score that quickly dissappear if left alone, it did something almost no game did and actually made me care about the scoring system as every 100,000 points grants an extra life. On top of which there's not only unlockable character colors but this version gives two new characters that weren't present in the original release that really shake up the game feel. Not only are their character designs striking (a dog riding a drone makes this game impossible to rate lower than 4 stars), but they also serve as an additional difficulty setting with the dog, Bullet, being an easy mode if you want to move and shoot at the same time, while Doris is a big target with slow walking speeds but her charging grenades allow her to rack up score big time and is essentially the speedrun character with how strong those explosives are. The controls could really be ironed out though even if it's because they wanted to stay true to the original, especially the lasso which requires you to rapidly tap the shoot button making you waste ammo unnecessarily if you have a power up. Had a really fun time overall, played it about 12 or so times and it was satisfying going from 4 continues in one playthrough on easy to no continues on hard mode.