There’s an obvious comparison to be made with Rayforce, both games utilizing a lock-on weapon that has you targeting incoming enemies (failed to mention when I wrote about Rayforce that you could only target enemies in the background; here you can shoot everything on-screen). The real trick of it ends up being the way your lock-on ends up taking precedence over your standard shot, forcing you to close distance with enemies and making attacking a much more conscious action then it ends up being in most shmups, a tension and release as you paint targets, a half-second of extra thought that will likely lead to some stupid deaths. But, on the plus side, at least you can bomb if things get too messy.

It’s a mechanical nuance that lends the game a great sense of intensity, but you’d be hard pressed to appreciate this in the moment, the music and visuals being as overwhelming as they are- this might be one of favorite shmups in terms of presentation: a few stages of corporate warfare set against Hitoshi Sakmoto’s incredible soundtrack, where you’ll break through asteroid belts and fleets of rival ships, an angry, guttural energy fueling the whole thing. Despite the difficulty of the game, I always wanted to push through, just to see what the next scenario would be- the highlight probably being Stage 3, descending through cloudcover to intercept an enemy convoy before fighting a dragon-tank boss. If you do try this out, you owe it to yourself to least get that far.