Let's get the comparisons out of the way. This game is inspired heavily by Guardian Legend for the NES. You're a robot girl who can transform into a ship, with stages divided into top down exploration and shmups segments. There are a lot of weapons you can use htat lead to lots of gameplay styles. Unlike Guardian Legend, this game is divided into stages rather than a large world with keys.

This game's difficulty options are pretty varied, I completed 2 out of the 4 main options, Normal (the lowest) and Formidable (the second highest). I don't know if I'm good enough at this to beat Heartless Rampage, which disables health drops, so I'll say I'm done for now. Formidable took me about twice as long to beat as normal, so I think it's reasonably hard. Aside from that, you get two control options, classic style where you can only shoot in the direction you're moving, and modern style, where once you shoot you can strafe to keep firing in one direction in exchange for increased enemy health. I only played on classic, I felt that the variety of weapons makes strafing unnecessary and you can work around it. (as a side note, I feel the "modern" control format for this type of top down shooter would be a twin stick style, but I guess sticking to the NES influence doesn't let you have twin sticks.) One last difficulty option you get is a choice between a sensor that can detect breakable walls or an extra point for buying upgrades. I went with the sensor for both runs, in hindsight I could've gone sensor once and just wrote down where all the upgrades are, they don't seem to change between difficulties.

You get a basic rapid fire shot and 6 alt shots that can be swapped at checkpoints at the start of the game, these use no ammo. Among the alt shots, there's a neat black hole gun that sucks enemies in and does damage. Unfortunately I found it wasn't that practical, particularly on Formidable where I mostly stuck with flamethrower for top down stages, charge shot for bosses, and shotgun/homing for shmup segments. Sorry bazooka you're not useful. There are special weapons too, one free choice out of 3 per stage and you can buy the others between levels, plus a special weapon at the start and second to last level. The variety here is really good, I feel it accounts for lots of different playstyles. My favorites wound up being the basic lance once I realized it could hit through walls, the laser that could be used as a strafe shot in normal mode, and the slow powerful fireball. I'm sure other players would have different preferences though. The upgrades you could get between stages aren't all so dramatic, but as a lance lover the free lance usage made me happy and the last chance hit gives a whole six seconds of invincibility so that's insane. You can't get all upgrades even when finding all upgrade points, I like that choice, really emphasizes different playstyles.

This game is pretty nice looking too, some of the levels like the beach and final level have nice color palettes. The soundtrack is pretty good too.

If you play this I'd recommend going normal mode to learn the weapons/upgrades before higher difficulties.