Toaplan-like vertical shmup that’s a bit barebones. It has a decently neat timetravel gimmick (switching periods per stage), but at only 5 stages long, 3 of which take place in a very similar-looking far future, it feels flat-out unfinished.

I’ve heard it called easy, and it is, sort of… but it’s still an arcade game, and I found myself getting extremely annoyed at its chunky hitbox and quick, basic patterns. Those things are palatable in games of the genre’s late 80s heyday, but a full decade later I want to have moved on.

There’s just nothing here to really grab—scoring is extremely basic; art is aggressively OK; music by Zuntata is at least cool ish, but it feels more like the product of Zuntata understudies. There’s nothing offensively bad, either, but still, for former Toaplan devs to come to Taito—a match seemingly made in heaven for STG fans—and produce something so mediocre is in itself a pretty big bummer.

Pro tip for anyone wanting to dive in in spite of the above: Player 2 type C ship is OP.

Zek-zeks.

I really just can't love a hori shmup with a big ol' hitbox, no matter what other cool shit is thrown in there. The tentacled "flint" that you can drop or shoot out in front of you to deal with incoming fire, and to latch on to enemies and destroy them, is pretty cool! The music is cool! The weapons are cool! There's some neat stage design!

But... it's a hori with a big ol hitbox. Where you get near the ceiling and it fucking kills you. Not to mention, the game feeds you speed-ups like crazy, which have you zipping around running into shit even more often (avoiding them is easier said than done when you're in a hallway about a quarter of the screen wide).

Old school horis... I just can't get down with 'em.

Sadly, it’s very sluggish on the Switch, both in terms of choppy framerate and input delay… all of which is not helped by the fact that it’s just a sluggish game in general.

I relish the simple pleasure of doling out shotgun blasts in an old west setting as much as the next guy, but I’d rather it not feel like I’m crawling and aiming through tar; especially if you’re gonna overlay it with Arcady/twitch trappings (combos for quick kills and the like).

Also, I got extremely tired of hearing Silas jabber over everything I was doing. Abolish narrators in games.