Mostly enjoyable with a few caveats. I love how the six stages (mostly) take you across locations you don't always see in shmups and the fire golem boss is rather memorable. I can also appreciate how, unlike most Konami shmups, you don't just lose everything on death.

That being said...it's rather difficult to determine whether or not something is an insta-kill or not. In this game, you can generally take a hit and just lose one of your firing options. At least, that applies to most projectiles with surfaces always resulting in insta-death. However, some things such as little chunks of rocks or a tiny fireball spewing out of a pipe in the fire stage will result in death no matter what. You're not going to know until if/when it happens, and that's sort of bad design.

Speaking of design, I felt the game provides a tough-but-fair challenge up until stage six when forgiving the above (which is easy enough to do considering most shmups just kill you in one hit regardless, plus it's plenty generous with extends on normal). Stage six, however, is just bullshit central with a bunch of traps that you simply need to have prior knowledge of before you can adequately route. This stage was almost enough to make me drop the game entirely after beating it, but I did manage to get a 1CC after a few attempts.

Overall I definitely had more fun with it than Gradius and Life Force, but as far as SNES shmups go, Space Megaforce still has yet to be beat.