first thing you'll notice is that the reticle moves much quicker than the player left to right as you aim from the foreground into the background, making repositioning yourself a bit of a fine art. shooting will lock your character in place which keeps reaiming a cinch, but when you're actively needing to evade attacks you have to make a lot of tradeoffs between having enemies lined up in your sights and being able to avoid their fire. in the vast majority of cases the obvious choice is to spray bullets and make quick adjustments with the helpful roll/dodge. however, as the game progresses, the coarse distance that this roll takes you will inevitably place you into other fire, bringing this original tradeoff back to the forefront. do you intentionally place your cursor far away from your opponent with the intent of dodging their fire and in the process lining them up for a quick kill? do you just avoid shooting at all and run down the clock? can you grab a powerup to slide out of the situation or take advantage of the copious i-frames on the jump or the melee attack? feeling around this flowchart is initially unintuitive, but with practice it becomes thrilling to push your toolkit to its limits.

across six stages (it seems the original set comprises the easy difficulty while normal and hard swap in one new level apiece) you'll more than get acquainted with the limited controls enough to take on the challenges that face you. originally I had tried to slot in "vast exploration of scenarios" (or something to that effect) in the prior sentence, but the game doesn't deserve quite that much credit. regular enemy design is phenomenal across the board, with an excellent range of bullet patterns, strategies to kill, movement/behavior, and combinations of encounters. a great example of this is the elevator ride in the underground which combines giant worms with a specific noggin weak point which can control at least half of your movable area at a time while metal casters lob molten steel to form temporary traps and trios of bothersome gnats take potshots at you. other than a few clunkers (the dull bank vault in the final stage, the inoffensive first area in the underground), there's total gold in scenario design to be found here.

where the game began to lose my interest is mainly in-between these with an abundance of repeated miniboss fights. the worst of these is a snappily-dressed duelist who scrambles on the floor after being shot only to stand back up and quickly snipe you if you aren't looking; once you become confident in his inability to fire back when you have him locked in a bullet stream, the only danger becomes losing your focus as you wait for him to stand up for the umpteenth time. other minibosses range from shockingly tricky (the mariachi skeleton who served as a huge brick wall for me within the first few minutes of the game) to unquestionable pushovers (the lumbering robots in the first part of the underground stage who rarely fight back and will quickly tumble with the slightest resistance). the main bosses themselves tend to fare a little better, but many of them lack substantial auxillary attack patterns that don't derive from simply sending out regular mooks to add a few extra bullets to deal with. without more substantial threats not simply stemming from whatever the primary attack is, a few repetitions on any boss will have you easily knowing the exact counter for each wind-up indicating an upcoming attack. on replays this becomes less than ideal, especially when considering the mostly-fixed enemy spawns and the timer that controls when one can move to the next phase. this latter aspect can be hastened by killing enemies to preemptively shave seconds off the clock, but combined with the aforementioned issues, I found myself zoning out more than once on replays.

most of this analysis stems from my runthrough on easy with clint mind you. I got utterly wiped on normal for my first several attempts and deigned to reduce the difficulty after having noticed others talk about that these settings seemed a little overtuned compared to the original. after my easy playthrough I decided to switch to one of the new characters, bullet the dog, for a playthrough on normal and instantly understood why they had elected to alter the game balance. no comment on doris as I didn't try her, but this mutt effectively renders the entire first paragraph of my review irrelevant. bullet not only can run around freely while shooting but also fires said shots from a drone that has noticable auto-aim. it becomes a totally different game when you can absent-mindedly strafe back and forth while barely attempting to focus your fire, and the supposed difficulty spike on normal becomes a total non-issue.

unfortunately I still had to replay the game (the first half anyway) multiple times with bullet due to my ps4 acting suspect over the last couple days and shutting down a couple of times while I had suspended the campaign to work/get food/etc., forcing me to start at the beginning more times than I would've liked to. for a game with an arcade-style structure this is somewhat damning; if I feel bored replaying a game that explictly is meant to be replayed many times, I can only give it so many props. still, just thinking about some of those specific levels gets me a bit giddy. I almost wish there was a level select cheat so I could skip that opening volley and jump to some of the best parts the game has to offer. eventually I'll come back and try the other characters if I can convince someone to try the multiplayer with me without scaring them off with the rigid handling.