I think it's the definition of an "ok shmup" -- has some fun stuff going for it, including surprisingly solid fundamentals, but gets dragged down by a million little annoyances.

Let's start with the good: the scoring system on Original mode is fun! It's a medal collectathon with a few twists--all enemies release tiny gold nuggets that increase your multiplier just a little; bigger enemies (when killed with missles) release larger ones that increase your multiplier a good amount; and each stage has a few secret triggers that turn all medals into little demon guys, which increase your multiplier by a lot. The incentive to kill big guys with focus shot for reward is tried and true, secrets are cool and not too difficult to uncover, and I think all of the bonus opportunities (destroying certain boss elements, keeping shields through the level, no-missing, etc.) are balanced decently well.

That and the aforementioned solid fundamentals (ship speed, fire rate and pace of the game all feel good) are where the positives end.

I'm not going to dwell too much on negatives because, frankly, it's death by 1000 cuts here as opposed to a few fatal flaws... but for a few examples: stage backgrounds often have a design that implies a physically restrictive hallway when there actually isn't one; certain objects have allowable collision that you just kinda have to figure out by trial and error; enemies shoot obscenely annoying, super-fast revenge bullets at high rank that destroy the any sense of flow or stage design; and certain levels present spams of collision dangers and bullet spewing enemies simultaneously in vomitous fashion.

I don't think a small team like this should have attempted an STG with not 1, not 2, not 3, but *4* different game modes, each with their own unique scoring structures. Just focus on a single one and do it well! Iron out every wrinkle! This is such a detail-oriented genre, and enthusiasts crave entries that are an inch wide but miles deep quite a lot more than the alternative. Feel like if they funneled all the dev and testing time into Original it could've been actually really great.

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.

I respect this game first and foremost for not babying you -- it drops you (literally) into zombie shopping mall hell and says, "figure it out." All of the mechanics I uncovered in the hours I played were quite cool -- holding books to increase stats; levelling up with survivor rescues and photography; unlockable special moves; the way game-time is woven into progression; etc... And the actual meat of the gameplay -- the dispatching of countless undead through comically varied means, including lawnmowers and umbrellas and mannequins and whatever else you can find -- is awesome. You can tell it's fine-tuned to feel exceptionally hefty. Every swing of a baseball bat, or pole, or dismembered hand feels consequential and releases sweet, sweet brain chemicals.

Where the game falters is fairly obvious. The "boss battles" (for example, the second encounter with Carlito) are embarrasments of design. Much of the world traversal feels too slow for a game that relies so heavily on it. Many of the coolest weapons are made far too difficult to uncover in the early game -- a needless roping off of fun. Finally, as many, many others have mentioned, the entire thing is a rickety tower of escort missions with the stupidest AI imaginable.

But, you know, at the end of the day I think there's still plenty of fun to be had here. There's a ton of genuinely great ideas to mull over, there's that miniature-open-world gamefeel that I personally love, and then of course there's Frank West -- a surprisingly delightful protagonist.

Recommended in spite of its flaws.

I haven't yet played R-Type, but I'm on the record as very much disliking R-Type-likes, and this is about as R-Type-like as you can get. Articulating arms above and below your ship annoyingly disperse your firepower backward every time you move forward, neutering any ability to play aggressively in the traditional STG sense (by pointblanking). Some may say that this works to enhance the game's puzzly feel, but I say it feels like complete shit and is ass.

Even so, I found some stuff to like about the level design over the first three stages, and it doesn't look or sound too bad.

Stage 4 though? Stage 4 can Rez right the fuck on out of here.

A Konami rail shooter that's essentially 3D Gradius, which is maybe a little bit cool.

I don't like playing these kinds of games at home (using digital control when emulating makes for deeply imprecise movement), but can acknowledge that they were probably pretty dope full-cabinet experiences back in the day.

Maybe an analog flight stick changes everything. I'll never know.

Things I liked:

- The gameplay. Smooth and linear and quick to pick up. Card abilities and weapons are super fun and varied, especially the REDACTED card at the end. Good stuff
- The story - it's not bad! Puts some meat on the game's bones, and the voice acting is good, contrary to popular belief
- The treasure hunts. Having to run a level a little slower and solve a platforming-related puzzle, all optional but in service of acquiring the game's good ending, is a nice departure from the main game, a different flavor to cleanse the palate and rest the thumbs a bit

Things I didn't like:

- The gameplay. It's sort of... slow, sluggish, shallow, at times? When you're not actively using a card ability, it doesn't feel great -- like eating your dang vegetables when you want to be stuffing your face with sweet sugary cake the entire time. Also, the levels are entirely linear -- would've been nice to get a few open concepts with numerous viable paths thrown in there
- The story - it's not great! A bit thin for how much time it demands of you (though everything is skippable so it's not a huge deal)
- The treasure hunts. jesus fucking christ some of these gifts were annoying to get. Holy god

Get it? Get how I both like and don't like almost every facet of the game? Pretty clever, I thought.

Ibara Kuro has the same beautiful spritework as the original game, the same relatively underrated prog-rock OST, the same deeply satisfying weaponry and fly-apart explosions. What it does not have is the Battle Garegga-esque scoring and rank structure, replaced here by what I consider to be the most satisfying grazing-and-cash-in mechanic I've ever experienced (I've not yet played some of the other heavy hitters in that field like Psyvariar, but I would be surprised if anything could unseat this absolute behemoth of bullet-riding).

In Kuro, you pump rank/difficulty up by collecting medals and other items, and then you just fucking surf on meticulously-well-placed and visually-gorgeous waves of pink and blue bullets. You watch a number with a very nice font skyrocket above your ship (the wonderfully-named "X-Treme Terror Counter), and when you can't take the heat anymore you smash that bomb button for huge bullet cancels and, if your timing was right, massive points.

True veterans will take this one step further and map out the specific points in each stage that Cave has built in a cancel, allowing the player to cash in without spending resources; and even sicker weirdos will revel in delicious boss milks, utilize insane aura-flash/hadou gun (bomb HOLD and release) strats for huge damage and gobs of max medals, and laugh maniacally as they rake in extends (one every 10 mil).

The original Ibara is an amazing shmup, underappreciated in its time and still a blast to play; but, for me, Kuro bests it. It's a risk/reward mecca for deeply experienced players, a goading test of nerves as much as skill, and wears all of its mechanics on its sleeve (as opposed to the notoriously secret-heavy and obfuscating Shinobu Yagawa-designed original).

It is an STG where you can sip tea and check your phone while easily milking tens of millions of points from a boss. That, my friends, is living, and anyone who tells you it's not needs to find inner peace.

High-quality dad shmup. Cool weapons, including a lightning shot that ricochets around the screen; big ol' robots, big chunky sprites; and music that decidedly does not rock and sounds like bleeps and bloops despite it being a game from 1997. (My keeping the score at a 4 even though the music is ass should tell you how goddamn good the visuals and gameplay are.)

There's nothing to nitpick here. If you like STGs at all, this is a truly excellent one, with tight design making up many times over for its slight lack of personality.

(One more thing -- who playtested that stage 3 octopus boss and thought, "yes, this is a good amount of health for this guy to have"? Dude shoots the lamest collection of dinky patterns and takes 8 years to die.)

We'll never see a game quite like this again -- a singular artistic vision, given space to breathe, to exist confidently outside of any of the conventions of its day, that's also a first-party big-budget blockbuster that pushes its hardware to the absolute limit.

Shadow of the Colossus brings the PS2 to its knees, and wrenches from it an experience that still rivals any of today's cinematic AAA offerings. (I haven't played the PS3 remaster OR the PS4 remake, yet, but I know that something will feel lost if the framerate isn't crawling to single digits during the game's unparalleled setpieces. You need to feel like the seams of the universe are barely holding; like the colossus' sword crashing down next to you is literally shaking the internals of the hardware you're playing the game on! 5 to 20 fps is fucking canon.).

I could write 10,000 words, but I'm tired, so I'll keep it short. This without-a-doubt deserves its status as one of the greatest games of all time. It's a certain work of art. There is one (1) less-than-phenomenal colossus fight -- sound off in the comments if you can guess which.

Patience is its core game mechanic.

Hail Dormin.

There's something to NMK's Raiden-like shooting game, Thunder Dragon. At its core it couldn't be simpler -- one ship option, four shot types to switch between (with falling, numbered items--collect consecutive items with the same number to power up) and 8 brutal levels to clear -- but there's all kinds of tight design and attention to detail that lift the game above its many brethren.

Damage feels balanced perfectly, enemy spawn patterns are interesting (especially in later stages), and there's great variance in the feel of, and optimal strategy for, each stage. Every weapon, I found through agonizing trial and error for a 1-ALL, has a distinct purpose.

I limped to the end of my eventual clear, barely snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, and came away with only two major complaints: bullet visibility sucks shit sometimes, especially when wielding the powered up #2 weapon; and the game simply shouldn't be 8 stages long. The first two stages are fluff -- make it a tight 6, starting at what is now 3, and I would've been even more thrilled than I was already to play over and over again.

A vertical STG where you wiggle the joystick back and forth to melee attack on your flanks. It is painful to play the way it was intended--slamming my arcade lever back and forth for a play session not only felt horrible, but also seemed potentially damaging--so it's nice that the ports of the game include the ability to map auto-wiggling to a button.

This, however, sort of breaks the game? The melee side attacks are not only incredibly powerful, but integral to scoring; and with the auto-wiggle, both scoring and surviving the first level becomes essentially automatic. Of course, the difficulty increases dramatically from there, but I couldn't help but feel weird and distracted throughout as I "cheated" many of the game's enemy patterns.

That's not the biggest deal in the world, really -- there's still plenty of difficult shmup gameplay here if you want it -- but, after a couple rounds, I concluded that this particular blend of melee, zero-damage bombs (they just provide a field of invincibility from bullets), and rather ineffectual vulcan shot just isn't for me.