Unfortunately ahead of its time. The archeologist puzzle mode is a pretty neat idea, and the rules are intuitive enough to grasp quickly, but the game came out before the Hold function and the super rotation system were common to Tetris; the hold function alone would have made a world of difference, given how many puzzles feel dependent on having a certain piece once an opening is cleared. I think they should bring the headline mode from Tetris Plus back in a modern entry. Hopefully the rights aren't tied up with Jaleco or something like that. Heck, bring back the Professor and his assistant in the next Puyo Tetris, them and puzzle mode would be a more welcome addition than the RPG boss mode PPT2 had.

In a word, delightful. Every stage has some kind of gimmick to it, and it doesn't quite so transparently feel like it follows the "introduce, iterate, test" structure that became so familiar in some of the NSMB games and Retro Studios DKC games (though it probably does follow that structure, it's just not so obvious about it). What maybe hasn't been said enough yet is that the online features let you cheese out difficult sections in stages like one might be able to if they were playing with local multiplayer, even if they're playing alone. That's kinda neat, though it does feel a bit cheap, at times, so it's a good thing it's opt-in.

It's a good game with a lot of good ideas, but I have a few hang-ups about it. For the price it is, it's worth it, but the problems regularly rear their heads.
What you have is a bullet hell-styled top-down shooting action game. You progress through levels and then encounter a boss at the end and midpoint of each level. The levels themselves are mostly just mechanisms to deliver encounters with enemies, and the enemies are mostly there to introduce and acclimate you to mechanics and concepts that will be put to the test in the bosses. Not to say that the levels are trivial, there's just not that many particularly memorable encounters outside the bosses; a special attack will handle most types of enemies after you've farmed enough ammo off of them. It's fun though, and the reflect, absorb, and dash abilities let you weave through and take advantage of enemy bullet patterns and feel like an expert doing it. The story is silly, but takes itself seriously enough that I was still compelled by the various idiosyncrasies of the characters. The music is very good, and I didn't find myself getting tired of any of the songs.
There are a couple problems though.
1. Hold inputs. By default, tapping right click does a reflect shine, and holding it activates absorb bullets. Both of these moves are suited to somewhat different situations (for example, it'd be nearly pointless to reflect bullets that aren't going to bounce back to hit an enemy, like those from a fragmenting grenade) and take up different amounts of meter, so it's frustrating that the input for each isn't more distinct. When you start the game, go into the options and change the absorb input from hold to hold and release; this fixes the problem. It does not fix the same problem for the spacebar's tap to dash, hold to do a meter-draining special move problem. The special move is useful in certain situations, but when the meter it drains is empty, you can no longer do the dash. The difference between the two inputs is so small, I suspect the dash might actually be a glitch entirely (as it's a very useful move, but isn't mentioned in the tutorial).
2. Meter placement. In a top-down shooting game like this, I find most of my time is spent looking at the player character and the area directly around the player character. Unfortunately, all the important meters for health, magic, shine, and ammo are at the bottom right corner of the screen, and are very small, and the same color as most environments, making them very difficult to evaluate at a glance. Audio indicators for low health and text pop-ups indicating low shine can be helpful, but often the text pop-ups obscure incoming bullets, and only appear when you're trying to activate a shine move anyway, so by then it's too late. This is also a problem with the rhythm bar at the top of the screen (which, as a sidenote, is a system that, while very necessary to success, feels a little tacked on somehow. Perhaps because the bar is so indistinct among the rest of the game).
3. No controller support. This isn't a large issue, but it might certainly be a problem for a few users.
Despite these problems and a few minor glitches, I still recommend the game. I don't think the issues it has drag it too far down once you learn to work around them, and I think the ideas it brings to the table are more than worth the price of admission.

Surprisingly solid, even with a single normal difficulty playthrough. There are a lot of evasive/defensive options at any given moment, to the point that it's very easy to forget about one or two of them (the "Winners Roll a Lot" title card ensured I never forgot about rolling, though that's not always the ideal option), and this can come back to bite you in later stages that call upon the utility of all of those options in some situation or another.
The time mechanic, while hardly strict enough to be that challenging on Normal difficulty (I finished the game with close to 10 minutes remaining on the clock, with very few repeat playthroughs of levels to lower my times - and those that I did only because I felt I'd learned to play the game better since my first run of them), does provide tension throughout every level. Some stages will shower you in a hail of bullets, and while it would probably be easiest to duck behind cover, in the back of your mind, there's a concern that doing so could draw out the level too long, and put you "over budget" for the level; not a horrible thing if it happens once, but if you get in the habit, it could leave you without enough time to reach the ending.
The presentation is mostly good, with enjoyable and fitting music throughout, and clean pixel graphics that clearly convey what they need to and just look good overall. But the voice acting (in English, at least) is abysmal; both the script and recordings seemed like they could have used at least a second pass. Given the retro aesthetics, it would have been more than acceptable to leave it out. As it stands, there's not even the option to turn it down separately (which would have left the cutscenes in silence, and cut down on the enemies spewing contextless 80's action movie references throughout the level - an option which I would have preferred to have). It's not too much of a problem, but it does leave me concerned about how the developer's more dialogue-heavy games will fare.
But that's the kicker: Bot Vice was solid enough that even though I'm not familiar with its inspirations, I really want to see what else DYA games has put out.

It's neat, often overlooked, but while it's impressive how much it does with very few concepts, by the end, it feels like it's overstayed its welcome, and every concept it's used has been stretched too thin. The bonus stages (and final boss) also feel very much at odds with the pace and playstyle of the rest of the game, requiring a speed and precision that the control scheme does not do much to accommodate. I would recommend against 100% completion (there's no bonus for it anyway). It would've been neat to see the idea explored again on the DS or 3DS, where the second screen could be used to see both aboveground and belowground simultaneously (a limitation that becomes an issue in a few stages with underground enemies), but it's too late for that now.

Pretty neat, but too short. The length is appropriate for the amount of story in it (though the fates of a few characters remains, for the moment, unfortunately ambiguous), but it doesn't feel like I'm suitably equipped for the hard mode after completing the normal playthrough. Then again, that was sort of the case with the base game, so it's probably fine. Yuffie and Sonon play pretty well, and the synergy system is neat, giving you an additional reason to budget your ATB meter for both characters. Elemental Ninjutsu is pretty neat - giving you essentially a palette of elemental damage to select from, regardless of what materia you entered the fight equipped with - but it feels like it might be too widely useful to remain as it is, so it'll probably be nerfed somehow in Rebirth. For this game, it serves as a good way to give your party a variety of moves to work with despite only having one properly controllable character.
The remarkably short length could be a huge detriment - worthwhile for people who are already onboard the FF7 Remake train, less so for people who felt lukewarm about the base game on PS4.

I think it's really cool that the developers were able to piece together this collection of archival work and what work had already been done and finish making the game. Unfortunately, I can absolutely see why it was canned at the time. It's fine, I guess, but some of the sequences feel like total BS (those rolling enemies when you're going uphill on the rainbow, the crab boss, the tedious nature of the final boss if you can't guess the right direction to throw the bombs to get some extra hits in), and sometimes the collision system has you getting hit when you could SWEAR you were landing on an enemy, not bumping into them from the side. If it goes on steep discount again, it might be worth picking up, but I don't think I'll be revisiting it any time soon.
Played in single player mode.