I've barely seen anything written about this game, positive or negative. Mostly negative, though. Most shmup sites don't even list it. What gives? Is it because it's on the 32X? Or did no one bother to play beyond the (admittedly awful) first boss?
I own the cartridge, and find it fascinating and challenging. You're given a fragile, weak ship that dies in one hit, but you can latch onto other ships, gaining armor and extra weapons. There's a huge variety of jackable ships, ranging from tiny popcorn enemies that attack with their thrusters, to massive tanks with close-range buzzsaws. If you attach to a ship long enough to hack it, you can use its main weapon after you've detached. There are powerups like options and bombs, but you need to detach from your augmentation, potentially losing it, to pick them up. You need to make plenty of decisions about which ships to jack, what items to pass on, and sometimes whether to sacrifice your armor in a Metal Slug-esque attack. If it blows up while you're in it, you have to eject before you're taken along.
The later bosses are pretty amazing. There's a monolithic head with floating appendages that taunts you while flying around the screen, spitting storms of needles and cubes. The final stage looks just like the original Zaxxon. The level progression is magnificently understated. Don't be fooled by the drab metallic screenshots, there's tropical seas, lava caves, and domed cities. There's even a separate multiplayer mode, which might be the first-ever example of a versus shmup.
Anyway, this game needs some love. It needs it more than the mediocre Kolibri, the only 32X shmup that anyone seems to care about.
