I got about 5 hours of gaming out of the 5 bucks this game costed during sale. Pretty good value for a decent shooter fix. I would not want it to be any shorter or longer.
Mini review if anyone haven't played it and is on the fence:
It is a pretty solid game with most flaws being tolerable. Nice presentation, great soundtrack, charming cut scenes and voice effects, and some glorious backgrounds. Pretty mediocre gameplay, I have to say, but never bad enough to make you quit the game. Sometimes pacing is quite slow with some sedating scrolling through environments without enemies, but it does build some anticipation and the music is good enough to carry you through these parts.
Stage 5 (with the huge battleship) in particular stands out with
this cozy and catchy music piece. Stage 1 and 2 has some strong tracks too. Unfortunately, stage 1 has a pretty nauseating space background with some fast parallax scrolling rocks moving in different directions (I am quite sensitive to this kind of noisy, layered, fast-moving graphics). However, stage 2 looks better and a bit more calming with the purple mountains far away in the background also suggesting vastness of space. Along with the solo guitar sound it is pretty epic. The developers could have dropped the generic first stage entirely, and made stage 2 the opening stage instead.
As for weapons, you can carry up to two options by picking up weapon items. The different weapons were pretty fun to play around with (the lightsaber worked very well on some bosses), but I tended to use either the Twin shot or the Laser. When in doubt, always use Lasers in STGs. Regardless of the weapon, you can choose among several different aims, and the search aim (homing) was unfortunately too good. As others have pointed out already, this is the game's biggest flaw as you don't need to do much aiming/shooting yourself, mostly dodging. The presence of overpowered homing weapons really plagued some early 90s STGs. Nevertheless, during these 5 hours I made enough mistakes to force me to checkpoint recover and do some aiming as well. I had some slightly frustrating check point recovery moments, but that struggle is part of the concept and it always felt fair.
Stage design. In comparison, I feel TF 3 is packed with more creative content and surprising moments. This is a bit generic and predictable at times, but it definitely has interesting moments too. There are some fast-scrolling mazes, some puzzle-ish problems with enemies cleverly shielded, and some unusual objects or enemies you don't know exactly what they will do (like blocking your shots in weird ways).
Bosses could have been more memorable. In an easy console shooter I am fine with a few very easy bosses, as it can be a relief after a long stage to have a easy boss to destroy, but I felt like half of the bosses required no memorization or dodging at all and that was a little bit too much. I think Thunder force games have had a little bit better balance and definitely more impact there. Last boss was pretty cool though!
One more thing about the search weapon. It was not just that it was overpowered, but it also was pretty stupid, sometimes aiming for enemies far away than those in your proximity. It was a convenient weapon but I think the game could have been better without it. Fixing that issue, polishing a few of the bosses, and I would put it in my top-10 console-exclusive shooters. Still great, casual console shooting experience if you like a relatively easy game.
Not TF3 greatness, but top quality mega drive shooting.