Considered posting this to Off Topic, but I think this gallery shooter qualifies as a widescreen fixed-field STG. Apparently, the devs had considered 4:3, but found that the game worked better at 16:9 – seems they were correct. There are integer/non-integer and nearest neighbor/smoothing options for the extremely well-done 320x180 screen. Critically, there is no RNG apart from special weapons and lives (on easy and normal).
Some may be put off by the FBI-mocking “Winners Don’t Use Keyboards” splash. But it may be appropriate, given the involved controls: left / right / cover / roll / aim / shoot / slash / next weapon / and previous weapon. I generally prefer fewer buttons, but I don’t think any here are extraneous, given the different strategies that can be used on the varied enemy types; I did remap cover, roll, and weapon on my X360 controller.
I like how the devs successfully tried something different. There are elements of Umihara Kawase (discrete levels, with an overall time limit on normal and hard), Time Crisis (fixed number of hits per level on hard and the announcer), and even Mega Man (death animation).
The game was introduced last year at $9.99, it was recently reduced to $4.99, and is currently on sale for $0.99 on both Steam and itch.io (DRM-free). There’s been precious little discussion of it anywhere, with Metacritic only identifying a single low-scoring review (2.5/5) that included criticism regarding difficulty that I think was too harsh, and rendered moot by significant difficulty adjustments – making easy easier and the addition of a level below that – a couple of months afterwards.
