Solid spiritual successor to Contra, has some nice variety, although enemy types can get repetitive. The combat has some depth to it, since you can do a melee attack when enemies are next to you, as well as different upgrade types, adding some variety in how you approach bosses, although the grenade powerup is very broken. The difficulty spikes are immense, but that's to be expected from this genre. I think that if this game had a more intriguing story and more enemy variety, I would've liked it more, but for a run and gun, you could do a lot worse, and this one is a very solid game.