For something that came out in '89, this game is gorgeous. Your moveset is varied enough to feel fun, and well-animated enough to make you feel like a badass. These, combined with the nice variety of action set-pieces, make it very apparent why this game was an arcade favorite when it came out. The difficulty curve goes from 'manageable' to 'downright mean' to 'psychotic' in the half-hour-or-so runtime of the game, at some points requiring near pixel-perfect aiming and millisecond-perfect timing. It gets pretty obnoxious, but I guess it's par for the course for a port of an arcade quarter-muncher.

I could put up with that level of difficulty especially given the brevity of the game, but the game is often very poor in communicating what it is you're supposed to be doing. Some enemies flash when you hit them and others don't, turning some of the boss fights into weird guessing games. The game makes use of both horizontal and vertical space well, but doesn't always make it clear where you need to go; the worst offender is a large area full of platforms and enemies where you need to go to a specific platform and jump upwards to progress, with no visual indication that there's anything there. Then there are the bosses like the floating robot that you fight in a room where the gravity is turned off. The idea is great, the gravity effects are fantastic from a technical point of view... but I have no bloody idea what is going on. I float around and slash at the boss, and once in awhile I lose health without knowing what is even hitting me or how to prevent it. I've replayed that boss many times over and even watched videos, and I still have no idea what is causing me to lose health.

The poor communication exacerbates the unforgiving difficulty, and while I appreciate a lot about this game, I have to file it under the "good for its time" pile.