If you ever wandered around shmup communities for long enough, you'll see that the mere mention of this game will make some gamers pale and inmediately insult it. Like if it were kusoge and that were an absolute fact, an axiom. Does it really deserve it though?

I took it upon myself to open it and experience this with no external input and purely using keyboard, and there is some cool package in there. This is a game that has taken a lot of previous game decisions and attempted to transform them to a "modern" aspect while also adding an extra focus on graphics to "cater" to a more casual audience, more so with the addition of the story mode.

Don't get me wrong, the game is definitely flawed in a few aspects. But whatever I could encounter... It wasn't really a deal-breaker.
Playing in story mode first instead of going straight to arcade made me appreciate how different the game was while not getting too angry over it.

- Time system being shit? Yeah, I guess it's one way to add an artificial "life-ish" system, while also being pretty much impossible to earn any noticeable advantage throughout your run due to its nature. This simply means it's a low-resources game (as in, few lives/bombs) and you better learn every stage and route it before doing some serious attempts! How many times were there situations on old shmups where if you got hit at bad times it was a run ender? This is the exact same.
- Enviromental hazards being confusing? They're all static, something like this probably happened on old 2D horizontal shmups too, and it also ties back to learning the levels beforehand. The collisions are a bit wonky but they're never unfair. Also disable screen shake.
- The one-hit kill hazards being even more confusing? You better route those too.
- Bad RNG scoring system? Eeh true, I guess. Most of your score comes from staying on Rank A, which involves storing as much time as possible by not getting hit. The multiplier is cool but I personally noticed it does too little for too big risks, specially on any kind of bosses. There is also that milk at the final boss so scoring is ultimately a bit flawed, yeah. And the arcade leaderboards apparently only store your score if you die (at least on the EX version) so that sucks. It doesn't help that no scoring runs exist online.
- The piano pickup? Definitely a remnant of the older era the devs wanted to let us feel. At that time negative pickups were more of a thing I guess. There are rarely any situations where you will instantly grab any pickup nonetheless, so once you get to see it a least once you'll be good.
- Bad shot balance? Yeah, for arcade only use the liberator ship, it's objectively the best. Subweapons are up to your preference (Gemini sucks tho) , and reflection is clearly the best... power or how it was called.

The key part here is that, with knowing that it was a different take on the shmup genre, I had fun. My lowered expectations were met and I appreciated what the devs attempted to bring to the table. I can't speak for the story since I never got too deep into it but I read all what the game has and it was a cool supplement.

So why do people complain that much if it's that similar to old shmups?
Maybe it is because people wanted to go straight to arcade and got crushed by the fact that it's not a blindable game and the fact that arcade mode also starts on a harder difficulty from the get go.
Maybe it comes from the fact that the devs "betrayed expectations" by announcing themselves on that system11 forum on around 2011 or so, making the game seem like a bigger deal than it ultimately was. (That would be a fair complaint but maybe not something to be so resentful for nowadays)
Maybe it's more the fact that after plenty of years people only remain with their negative experiences regarding this. Maybe more so if they only ever touched the original game, which has more fuckups. (Yes, play EX and not the original, there is no positive difference unless you want to use the 360)

Oh yeah, and fair warning: the game is NOT too compatible with Windows 11, it will randomly crash on level transitions. So stick to Windows 10 or lower. I haven't confirmed if this is really the issue but it worked for me.

Not having any experience with "Shmups", I had no idea I would enjoy this one so much. The game looks and plays fantastic, and becomes a game of memorization, which I really enjoyed a ton.

The journey to "Dies Irae", being promoted to General of the Air Force was filled with challenging and rewarding tasks, such as completing a stage on Insane without pickups, destroying 100% of all bosses with the primary weapon only, or completing each stage in Score Attack with a ranking of at least A.

Fantastic experience, and one that made me want to play more Shmups in the future.