It's...basically discount Darius II. This game made sense for its time, but ultimately it feels like a rehash of Darius I and II.
The one good thing that can be said is that its difficulty curve is somewhat more reasonable, but that's kinda offset by the lack of extra lives or continues. You can set your starting lives to 8 but that's about it; there is a 50 lives cheat code but sadly it's not available in the Darius Cosmic Collection version since you cannot map the SNES L or R buttons.
The one good thing that can be said is that its difficulty curve is somewhat more reasonable, but that's kinda offset by the lack of extra lives or continues. You can set your starting lives to 8 but that's about it; there is a 50 lives cheat code but sadly it's not available in the Darius Cosmic Collection version since you cannot map the SNES L or R buttons.