My expectations were set pretty high from things I had heard about this one, and honestly I was pretty rarely let down. I'm not too partial to the art style, nor the 4-way firing in comparison to the Contra series' 8, but other than minor nitpicks I had a really nice time with this. Not quite as cinematic or charming as Contra III or Hard Corps imo, which is usually what keeps bringing me back to those two, but it definitely catches up in terms of how enjoyable it is to play (very likely actually surpassing III in this regard). I should definitely look into a few more from this series sooner or later.

Going back to the mention of 4-way firing, actually - you can kinda fire in diagonals with the machine gun, but you have to alternate between firing up and forward to create a "spray" of sorts. It's not always worth the trouble though, especially considering you can't just hold the button down for some reason. That's pretty established with machine guns in video games.